Alibaba has launched a new version of its AI model, Qwen2.5 Max, claiming it performed better than DeepSeek’s AI, OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Meta’s Llama. The Chinese tech company’s cloud division claimed in a statement that “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” referring to the advanced open-source AI models from OpenAI and Meta.
The announcement comes on the heels of the shockwaves DeepSeek’s AI models have sent in the global AI landscape. The release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model on January 10, and its R1 model on January 20, rattled Silicon Valley, causing tech stocks to drop.
DeepSeek-V3, which it says is as good as OpenAI’s GPT-4o but much cheaper. Alibaba’s introduction of Qwen 2.5 Max appears to be a direct response to the rise of DeepSeek, which recently released another model, R1, causing a stir.
DeepSeek, founded just 20 months ago in Hangzhou, Alibaba’s home city, has emerged as a major player in the field of AI, drawing attention for its low-cost, high-performance models. The startup has forced established players like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu to enhance their AI systems to keep pace with the competition.
As part of the ongoing AI price war, these companies have slashed prices to capture a larger share of the market.
Last year, DeepSeek’s release of its V2 model sparked a price war within China‘s AI market. The model, priced at just 1 yuan (Rs 11) per 1 million tokens processed, was open-source and significantly cheaper than most competitors. This pricing strategy led Alibaba’s cloud division to slash its prices by up to 97 per cent on certain models.
The rising competition has forced the industry’s biggest players to re-evaluate their strategies. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently acknowledged DeepSeek’s success, calling its progress “impressive.” He also hinted that OpenAI was working on even more advanced models in the future.
OpenAI Alleges Its AI Models Were Used to Build DeepSeek-R1: Report
OpenAI has reportedly claimed that DeepSeek might have distilled its artificial intelligence (AI) models to build the R1 model. As per the report, the San Francisco-based AI firm stated that it has evidence that some users were using its AI models’ outputs for a competitor, which is suspected to be DeepSeek. Notably, the Chinese company released the open-source DeepSeek-R1 AI model last week and hosted it on GitHub and Hugging Face. The reasoning-focused model surpassed the capabilities of the ChatGPT-maker’s o1 AI models in several benchmarks.
According to a Financial Times report, OpenAI claimed that its proprietary AI models were used to train DeepSeek’s models. The company told the publication that it had seen evidence of distillation from several accounts using the OpenAI application programming interface (API). The AI firm and its cloud partner Microsoft investigated the issue and blocked their access.