Chinese tech company Alibaba has unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that it claims outperforms its rivals at OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek.
The announcement of the Qwen2.5-Max model yesterday (Jan. 29) is the second major AI announcement from China this week, after DeepSeek’s R1 open-weight model took the world by storm following claims that it performs better and is more cost-effective than its American competitors.
Now, Alibaba claims that Qwen 2.5-Max, which is also partly open-source, is even more impressive — surpassing a number of rival models in various tests run by the company.
“In benchmark tests such as Arena-Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, GPQA-Diamond and MMLU-Pro, Qwen2.5-Max is on par with [Anthropic’s] Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and almost completely surpasses [OpenAI’s] GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and [Meta’s] Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba representatives wrote Jan. 28 in a translated statement on WeChat.
Related: DeepSeek stuns tech industry with new AI image generator that beats OpenAI’s DALL-E 3
The news comes at an uncertain time for American tech companies. Following DeepSeek’s announcement, the AI chatbot quickly overtook ChatGPT to become the most downloaded free app in Apple’s U.S. App Store.
The company’s claims that it achieved better results, while training and running its model at a fraction of the cost, sent shockwaves around the world — wiping $1 trillion from the valuations of leading tech companies such as Nvidia, whose loss of $589 billion was the biggest one-day market loss in U.S. history.
DeepSeek’s success has also led to a domestic battle among China’s top AI companies, triggering TikTok owner ByteDance to update its Doubao model and likely prompting Alibaba to announce its own new model
China’s growing competitiveness in AI has become a source of panic for its U.S. counterparts, with OpenAI claiming today (Jan. 29) that DeepSeek plagiarized parts of OpenAI’s models to train its own.
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