Alibaba Unveils Qwen 2.5 AI, Claims It Beats OpenAI, DeepSeek

Chinese tech giant, Alibaba has released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence (AI) model. According to the company, the new AI model will outperform the highly acclaimed DeepSeek-V3, OpenAI and Meta’s open-source AI models.

“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said yesterday in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account. Qwen 2.5-Max’s release occurred on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families.

Industry watchers believe that Alibaba’s announcement reflects the pressure that Chinese startup, DeepSeek’s announcement is having not only on global rivals but domestic competition.

DeepSeek-V2 was released in May 2024 and quickly disrupted the Chinese AI market due to its aggressively low pricing. As a result, major Chinese tech companies such as ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba have been compelled to lower their pricing structures in response to DeepSeek’s strategy.

“The Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares 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”, an analyst told Reuters.

READ MORE:

• Dangote Refinery Cuts Petrol Price by N100
• Placid Takes Over as Force PRO from Hundeyin
• Appeal Court Ruling Made Me Dump PDP For APC – Gov. Lawal
• Wike Urges Makinde’s Faction to Set Aside Pride Following Appeal Court Ruling on PDP Crisis
• Dangote Refinery Raises Petrol Price to ₦1,175 Per Litre

Recall that two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model. During its announcement, TikTok claimed that its model outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME. This echoed DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 model rivalled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks.

AIME is an evaluation protocol that utilizes multiple LLM evaluations to measure how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions. Similar benchmarks include MATH-500 and SWE-bench Verified.