In a rare move, Chinese tech company Alibaba released a new version of the Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model during the Lunar New Year. The tech firm claims this update surpasses DeepSeek-V3, which had a meteoric rise in popularity in the past three weeks.
With this release, we’re now seeing that not only are US companies intensifying the AI race against the Chinese, but local competition also wants to stay ahead.
As first reported by Reuters, Alibaba announced that its new AI model outperforms the most recent LLM models available, even though it doesn’t offer ChatGPT Operator-like features. “Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms… almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” posted the company on WeChat.
That said, Alibaba continues to defy other major Chinese players, including DeepSeek, Baidu, and Tencent. Last year, the company slashed its usage prices since the DeepSeek-V2 was not only open-source but also cost around $0.14 per 1 million tokens. Baidu also followed the price cut.
AI race intensifies in the US
Over here, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, teased several “exciting new features” coming to ChatGPT as DeepSeek’s popularity exploded. Then, the company announced a new ChatGPT Gov tool to strengthen ties with the US government, followed by a post with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella about all the crazy new stuff OpenAI has planned.
This is all due to DeepSeek’s sophisticated R1 reasoning model. While it’s as good as ChatGPT’s o1, what impressed everyone is that training the model costs a fraction of what OpenAI usually spends.
That being said, OpenAI says there is evidence that DeepSeek distilled ChatGPT to train its AI models. If true, the practice violates OpenAI’s terms of service for ChatGPT.
Ironically, if OpenAI’s claim is true, it’ll make the company experience what many creators felt when they discovered OpenAI may have trained its ChatGPT models using copyrighted materials without consent.
BGR will let you know as we learn more about new AI models from China, such as Alibaba, DeepSeek, and others, as well as the latest advancements in the US market.
