In a move that strengthens its position in the AI race, China’s Alibaba Group has launched its new model “Qwen 2.5-Max,” claiming it outperforms currently available models.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba launched “Qwen 2.5-Max” on Thursday, January 30, 2025, stating that this advanced AI model surpasses the capabilities of currently available models.
The rapid emergence of Chinese competitors is expected to heighten concerns in Washington, as U.S. companies have invested billions of dollars in developing AI-based models, while Chinese firms have rolled out similar programs at significantly lower costs.
This announcement comes just days after Chinese company DeepSeek introduced a sophisticated AI chatbot, causing a stir in Silicon Valley and reigniting focus on the U.S.-China rivalry in the field. Despite massive investments by American firms, Chinese AI models have made rapid progress at a fraction of the cost.
A rapidly accelerating tech race
The Qwen development team stated that its performance competes with OpenAI’s “ChatGPT-4” and Anthropic’s “Claude 3.5 Sonnet,” having been trained on over 20 trillion tokens. Currently, “Qwen 2.5-Max” is available to developers through Alibaba Cloud and accessible via the company’s chat platform, “Qwen Chat.”
Alibaba’s model, trained on more than 20 trillion tokens, hasn’t been compared to DeepSeek’s “DeepSeek-R1,” which caused significant reactions when launched on January 20.
With Alibaba’s strong entry into this field, global AI competition appears to be escalating further, paving the way for technological developments that may soon reshape the market landscape.