China Stole the AI Show: The new AI from Alibaba Qwen-2.5 is better than DeepSeek?
The big chinese tech company Alibaba founded by Jack ma, opens a new chapter on Wednesday on Lunar New Year by releasing a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed it has surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3. The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.
What Is Qwen 2.5-Max?
Qwen 2.5-Max is a large language ai model from Alibaba AI. It is an upgraded version of their popular Qwen 2.5 model. This artificial intelligence model utilizes a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, which means it uses a series of expert networks to handle different aspects of language processing. This artificial intelligence excels in language understanding, reasoning, and code generation. Alibaba has made it that Qwen 2.5 to empower businesses, developers, and researchers with an open-source framework. This means greater accessibility, customization, and innovation, making it a game-changer in the AI ecosystem.
Who Is Behind Qwen 2.5-Max?
Qwen 2.5-Max was released firstly on January 29 2025 by Alibaba AI marking a significant advancement in the AI industry -- a chinese leading AI and technology company. Alibaba has also created:
- Qwen2-VL. A vision language model capable of comprehending videos and supporting video-based question-answering
- Over 100 new open-source AI models, known as Qwen 2.5 designed for various applications across sectors like automotive, gaming, and scientific research. These models range in size and are proficient in mathematics, coding, and support for over 29 languages
- Text-to-Video AI. Alibaba launched a text-to-video tool powered by its AI models, allowing users to generate videos from text prompts. Visit Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba's cloud unit announced on its official WeChat account: "Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B," referring to OpenAI and Meta's most advanced open-source AI models.
On January 10 when it was released DeepSeek's AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the January 20 release of its R1 model, shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares like $NVDA. $META to plunge, with the Chinese startup's purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States.
US competitors vs Chinese Competitors
With the release of DeepSeek's V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, the chinese AI startup triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May. The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens - or units of data processed by the AI model - led to Alibaba's cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models.
Conclusion
While large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba have hundreds of thousands of employees, DeepSeek operates like a research lab, staffed mainly by young graduates and doctorate students from top Chinese universities. China is setting
Qwen 2.5-Max proved several key points:
- Advanced AI doesn't require endless funds
- Competition breeds innovation even within China
- Efficient models can outperform in benchmarks
Alibaba's Qwen 2.5-Max isn't just a model; it's a statement of intent.
The AI race is far from over...