Online marketplace company Alibaba says its Qwen 2.5 AI model is better than the AI newcomer DeepSeek.
The latter caught the world’s attention after matching the performance of long-standing competitors like ChatGPT at lower costs.
Yet, Alibaba’s cloud unit announced in its official WeChat account that it outperforms DeepSeek’s previous model V3.
Qwen: “Truth from a thousand questions”
Welcome to use the API through the service of Alibaba cloud. Using the API is as easy as using any other OpenAI-API compatible service. pic.twitter.com/94N8ACgRMs
— Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen) January 28, 2025
Qwen’s original name is “Tongyi Qianwen,” which roughly translates to “truth from a thousand questions.”
Alibaba announced its development as early as 2023, when it promised features like proofreading documents and generating meeting notes.
Zhou Jingren, Alibaba Cloud’s Chief Technology Officer, said this new AI model will help businesses keep up with rapid tech trends:
“We hope to facilitate businesses from all industries with their intelligence transformation, and ultimately, help boost their business productivity.”
Learn more about Qwen’s earlier features from this report.
Alibaba marked the 2025 Lunar New Year by eclipsing DeepSeek, the other Chinese AI model that shook the United State’s AI dominance.
Reuters cited Alibaba’s official WeChat announcement:
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms… almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B.”
Moreover, Qwen has offshoot models for specific purposes like coding, math, vision language, and audio.
The Chinese AI models have yet to prove whether they can dethrone Western counterparts and dominate artificial intelligence.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman praised the latest model DeepSeek-r1. He posted on X that it’s “legit invigorating to have a new competitor!”
US President Donald Trump also stated in response to China’s emerging AI innovations:
“The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing.”