Chinese tech company Alibaba rolled out a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model on Wednesday, claiming it outperforms the latest version of DeepSeek, owned by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer.
The release of the latest version of Qwen 2.5-Max coincided with the first day of the Lunar New Year, a time when most Chinese people are off work and with their families. The unexpected release is likely an indicator of the pressure that DeepSeek’s sharp rise in popularity has put on the international AI industry, stunning investors and sinking some tech stocks.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said, referring to its strongest competitors such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which powers ChatGPT.
In the wake of DeepSeek’s new AI chatbot release, Nvidia’s stock lost nearly USD 600 billion on Monday as investors frantically sold the stock. However, experts believe the massive sellout may have been an overreaction, and Nvidia’s share quickly recovered the following day, increasing by 8.8%.
DeepSeek’s success has not only rattled Silicon Valley but has also led local competitors to upgrade their own AI models since the release of its “DeepSeek R1” version on January 10.
Two days after the release, ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed had outperformed Microsoft-supported OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that stress-tests an AI model’s ability to understand and respond to complex instructions, Reuters reported.