Alibaba's Tongyi AI smartphone. (Image credit: Getty Images)
Chinese tech firm Alibaba has announced a new version of artificial intelligence (AI) that it claims outperforms rivals such as OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek.
The announcement of the Qwen2.5-Max came yesterday (January 29) and marks the second major AI announcement from China this week, following the release of the open-source DeepSeek R1, which made waves around the world with claims of being more efficient and cost-effective than its American counterparts.
Now Alibaba claims that the Qwen 2.5-Max, which is also partially open source, has even more impressive results, beating out many competing models in various tests conducted by the company.
“In performance tests such as Arena-Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, GPQA-Diamond, and MMLU-Pro, Qwen2.5-Max performs on par with Claude-3.5-Sonnet [Anthropic], and almost completely outperforms GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 [OpenAI], and Llama-3.1-405B [Meta],” Alibaba said in a translated statement on WeChat on Jan. 28.
The news comes at an uncertain time for the US tech giants. Following the announcement of DeepSeek, the AI-powered chatbot quickly surpassed ChatGPT in popularity and took the top spot among free apps in Apple's US App Store.
The company's claims that it had achieved remarkable results while spending a fraction of the money to train and operate its model shocked the global community, causing leading tech companies like Nvidia to lose $1 trillion, with a $589 billion loss, the largest single-day market loss in U.S. history.
DeepSeek's success has also sparked internal conflicts among China's leading AI companies, forcing TikTok owner ByteDance to revamp its Doubao model and likely prompting Alibaba to announce its own new model.
China's growing competitiveness in artificial intelligence is worrying its American counterparts. OpenAI said today (January 29) that DeepSeek plagiarized components of OpenAI models to train its own.
Ben TurnerNavigate Social LinksSenior Staff Writer
Ben Turner is a writer for Live Science based in the UK. He covers physics and astronomy, as well as other topics such as technology and climate change. He studied particle physics at University College London before becoming a journalist. In his spare time, Ben enjoys reading, playing guitar, and playing chess.
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