Key points
- Alibaba claims its model outperforms GPT-4, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1
- DeepSeek’s success has led to competition among its domestic companies
- ByteDance released an update to its leading Al model claiming to outperform OpenAI’s o1
- Baidu released China’s first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023
BEIJING: Chinese tech company Alibaba, opened a new tab on Wednesday and released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.
The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese citizens are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s sudden rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just foreign rivals, but also its domestic ones, according to the Japan Times.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said in a post shared on its official WeChat account.
The January 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the January 20 release of its R1 model, has shaken Silicon Valley and made tech shares plunge, with the Chinese startup’s purportedly low development as well as usage costs making investors question big spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States.
China’s domestic competition
However, DeepSeek’s success has also led to competition between its domestic competitors to upgrade their AI models.
TikTok owner ByteDance, two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, released an update to its leading AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a standard test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to difficult instructions.
This echoed DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 model rivalled OpenAI’s o1 on different performance standards.
DeepSeek-V2, the predecessor of DeepSeek’s V3 model, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May.
Alibaba’s price cuts
The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and very cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens – or units of data processed by the AI model – led to Alibaba’s cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97 per cent on various models.
Other Chinese tech firms followed suit, including Baidu opening a new tab, which released China’s first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023, and the country’s most valuable internet company Tencent, opening a new tab.
Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s founder, said in a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July that the startup “did not care” about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal.
READ ALSO: “Large-Scale Malicious Attacks” Affecting Services: DeepSeek
OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
Liang said in his July interview that he believed China’s largest tech companies might not be well suited to the future of the AI industry, contrasting their high costs and top-down structures with DeepSeek’s lean operation and loose management style.
“Large foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants’ capabilities have their limits,” he said.
