Alibaba Releases New Qwen AI Model And Claims It Outperforms DeepSeek-V3

The Chinese giant Alibaba released the latest version of its flagship AI model Qwen this Wednesday and claims it can perform better than the popular R1 version of the Chinese startup DeepSeek, which launched a few days ago.

According to Reuters, Alibaba launched the new Qwen 2.5-Max, as it has named the new reasoning model, right during the holidays of the Lunar New Year in China, to join the massive AI developments of the past few days and add domestic competition.

On Monday, DeepSeek reached first place on Apple’s App Store in the United States, surpassing ChatGPT, concerning other companies in the AI industry and alarming investors—Nvidia shares dropped 17% in just one day.

Now, Alibaba has announced the latest versions of its Qwen model—it released 100 open-source AI models for the Qwen suite in September last year—promising better results than popular frontier models.

“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms (…) almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” wrote the company on its official WeChat account.

The new reasoning model Qwen 2.5-Max’s API is available through Alibaba’s cloud and users can also test the model on its chat page.

“We are developing Qwen2.5-Max, a large-scale MoE model that has been pretrained on over 20 trillion tokens and further post-trained with curated Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) methodologies,” wrote Qwen Team in Github.

The Chinese giant also released Qwen2.5-VL on Monday, a series of multimodal AI models that can also process images and access mobiles and computers to perform tasks. OpenAI announced a similar feature, Operator, allowing ChatGPT to perform tasks autonomously taking control of the user’s computer.

According to Alibaba’s team, all Qwen models outperform competition from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek.