Alibaba claims that its AI model outperforms DeepSeek

Alibaba, a Chinese internet corporation, announced a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model on Wednesday, claiming it outperformed the much-lauded DeepSeek-V3.
The Qwen 2.5-Max’s odd release date—the first day of the Lunar New Year, when the majority of Chinese are off from work and spending time with their families—indicates how much pressure DeepSeek’s explosive growth over the last three weeks has put on both its domestic and international competitors.

Alibaba’s cloud subsidiary released a statement on its official WeChat account stating that “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms… almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B,” alluding to the most cutting-edge open-source AI models from OpenAI and Meta.
Silicon Valley has been rocked by the Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, which is powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, and the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model. The Chinese startup’s allegedly low development and usage costs have caused investors to doubt the massive spending plans of top AI companies in the US.

However, DeepSeek’s domestic competitors are rushing to improve their own AI models as a result of its success.
ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, published an upgrade to their flagship AI model two days after DeepSeek-R1 was launched, claiming that it performed better than OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that gauges how effectively AI models comprehend and react to intricate instructions, was supported by Microsoft.
This supported DeepSeek’s assertion that, on a number of performance metrics, their R1 model was on par with OpenAI’s o1.

When DeepSeek’s V3 model’s predecessor, DeepSeek-V2, was published in May of last year, it set off a pricing war for AI models in China.
Alibaba’s cloud division announced price reductions of up to 97% on a variety of models due to DeepSeek-V2’s open-source nature and historically low cost of just 1 yuan ($0.14) for 1 million tokens, or units of data processed by the AI model.
Other Chinese tech firms followed suit, such as Tencent, the most valuable internet business in the nation, and Baidu, which launched China’s first ChatGPT-like app in March 2023.

In a rare interview with Chinese media site Waves in July, Liang Wenfeng, the mysterious creator of DeepSeek, stated that the company “did not care” about pricing wars and that its primary objective was to achieve artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
AGI is defined by OpenAI as autonomous systems that outperform humans in the majority of economically significant tasks.
Young graduates and PhD students from prestigious Chinese universities make up the majority of DeepSeek’s workforce, which functions more like a research lab than the hundreds of thousands of workers employed by major Chinese internet businesses like Alibaba.
Liang contrasted DeepSeek’s lean operations and flexible management style with the exorbitant expenses and top-down structures of China’s major tech companies, saying in his July interview that he thought they would not be well suited to the future of the AI business.