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Alibaba releases new version of AI model, claims it outperforms DeepSeek-V3
The sudden release of the Alibaba AI model is a sign of the pressure created in the industry after the meteoric rise of the Chinese AI newcomer DeepSeek
Chinese tech giant Alibaba on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed out-performed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3, reported Reuters.
The sudden release of the AI model, on the first day of the Lunar New Year, when most Chinese people are on holiday, is a sign of the pressure that has been created in the industry after the arrival and meteoric rise of the Chinese AI newcomer DeepSeek, which has unseated not just domestic but international rivals as well.
Also Read: How DeepSeek, Chinese AI is buzzing in tech and shaking up ChatGPT, Nvidia
"Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B," Alibaba's cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta's most advanced open-source AI models.
On January 10, DeepSeek launched its AI assistant powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model and later, on January 20, they released the R1 model, a low-cost, high performance model which plunged the industry into chaos.
Also Read: 'Where is Krutrim?' Indians take a dig at Bhavish Aggarwal AI firm amid DeepSeek buzz
Merely two days after the launch of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI's o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.
Also Read: Who is Luo Fuli, the ‘AI prodigy’ behind DeepSeek's language models
Previously, the launch of the DeepSeek-V2 model in May, 2024 had caused an AI model price war in China with Alibaba's cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models, and other companies doing the same.
However, Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek's founder, said in an interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July that the startup "did not care" about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal.
