Chinese tech company Alibaba on Wednesday 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\u2019s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek\u2019s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition. \u201cQwen 2.5-Max outperforms \u2026 almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,\u201d Alibaba\u2019s cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta\u2019s most advanced open-source AI models. The January 10 release of DeepSeek\u2019s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the January 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup\u2019s purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States. But DeepSeek\u2019s success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models. Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI\u2019s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions. This echoed DeepSeek\u2019s claim that its R1 model rivaled OpenAI\u2019s o1 on several performance benchmarks. Deepseek Versus Domestic Competitors The predecessor of DeepSeek\u2019s V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May. The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens \u2013 or units of data processed by the AI model \u2013 led to Alibaba\u2019s cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models. Other Chinese tech companies followed suit, including Baidu, which released China\u2019s first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023, and the country\u2019s most valuable internet company Tencent. Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek\u2019s enigmatic founder, said in a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July that the startup \u201cdid not care\u201d about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal. OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks. While large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba have hundreds of thousands of employees, DeepSeek operates like a research lab, staffed mainly by young graduates and doctorate students from top Chinese universities. Liang said in his July interview that he believed China\u2019s 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\u2019s lean operation and loose management style. \u201cLarge foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants\u2019 capabilities have their limits,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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