Chinese tech giant Alibaba has unveiled Qwen2.5-Max, a new AI model designed to compete with some of the most advanced AI systems available today. According to the company, this model has outperformed several leading AI models on key performance parameters.
The announcement comes shortly after Chinese startup DeepSeek launched its own AI models, shaking up the industry and challenging the long-held belief that the US dominates the AI sector. The rapid progress of Chinese AI models has raised concerns in the US, where tech companies have invested billions in AI research, investments that Chinese startups are now matching at a fraction of the cost.
In a blog post, Alibaba’s Qwen team claimed that Qwen2.5-Max has outperformed DeepSeek V3 on multiple tests, including coding capabilities and general AI tasks. It has also demonstrated competitive results against industry leaders like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude-3.5-Sonnet.
The model has been trained with over 20 trillion data tokens, ensuring a broad knowledge base. However, the team did not directly compare it to DeepSeek’s R3, a reasoning-focused AI that gained attention after its launch as a chatbot on January 20.
Developers can now access Qwen2.5-Max through Alibaba Cloud services and use it via Qwen Chat, the company’s conversational AI platform. The system also supports OpenAI’s API format, making it easy for companies already using similar AI tools to integrate it into their workflows.
