The competition in the AI industry is heating up, and Alibaba has just made a bold move with the launch of its latest AI model, Qwen 2.5 Max. The Chinese tech giant claims its new model outperforms some of the most advanced AI systems on the market, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Meta’s Llama-3.1-405B.
This announcement comes at a time when the global AI landscape is witnessing rapid disruption, particularly due to the rise of DeepSeek, a relatively young but highly competitive AI startup.
In a recent statement, Alibaba’s cloud division declared that Qwen 2.5 Max outperforms its top rivals “almost across the board.” This bold assertion positions Alibaba as a serious contender in the AI arms race, as it looks to challenge the dominance of established players like OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek.
The launch of DeepSeek-V3 on January 10, followed by the DeepSeek R1 model on January 20, sent shockwaves through the AI world. The startup, which was founded just 20 months ago in Alibaba’s hometown of Hangzhou, has quickly gained attention for its low-cost, high-performance AI models.
DeepSeek’s rise has had a significant impact on the AI industry, particularly in China. When it launched its V2 model last year, priced at just 1 yuan (approximately ₹11) per million tokens, it sparked an AI price war.
This forced competitors like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu to slash their prices in order to stay competitive. In some cases, Alibaba’s cloud division reduced its AI model pricing by up to 97%.
With AI models becoming both cheaper and more powerful, the pressure is mounting on industry giants to keep innovating. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged DeepSeek’s impressive progress, hinting that OpenAI is working on even more advanced models to maintain its lead in the industry.