On Wednesday, January 29, the tech giant claimed that its latest update surpasses the highly popular and discussed DeepSeek-V3, as reported by Reuters.
Qwen 2.5 Max was launched on the first day of the Lunar New Year, a time when most people are taking a break from work and social media altogether.
The unusual timing of the launch points to the pressure DeepSeek is exerting not only on international competitors but also on its domestic rivals.
Alibaba’s cloud unit made an announcement on its official WeChat account, stating, “Qwen 2.5 Max outperforms… almost across the board GPT-4, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B,” referring to OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced open-source AI models.
DeepSeek’s AI assistant release on January 10 and its model R1 drop on January 20 shocked Silicon Valley, causing tech stocks to drop.
Additionally, the Chinese startup is using a fraction of funds compared to its U.S. counterpart, prompting investors to question the huge spending of AI firms in the United States.
Following DeepSeek’s success, ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, also updated its flagship AI model, claiming that it topped OpenAI’s o1 in AIME.
