The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has published benchmark scores and touted what it calls world-leading performance with its new artificial intelligence model release.
The upgraded Qwen 2.5 Max edition scored better than the highly touted DeepSeek V3 model and the Llama model develped by the Facebook parent Meta Platforms, according to figures in an announcement by Alibaba Cloud on WeChat.
Alongside Tencent and Baidu, Alibaba has poured significant resources into its cloud services segment and is engaged in a hot contest to recruit China’s AI developers to use its tools.
DeepSeek, a 20-month-old startup that was founded in Alibaba’s home city, Hangzhou, became a global sensation this week and figures prominently as the first benchmark that Alibaba appears to now measure itself against.
Alibaba Cloud also shared scores that suggest its AI beats the models of OpenAI and Anthropic in certain benchmarks.
Cloud service providers like Alibaba and Tencent have slashed their pricing in recent months in an effort to win over more users.
DeepSeek has already contributed to that price war, alongside a half-dozen other promising AI startups in China that have secured investor funding at valuations that give them unicorn status of $1 billion or more.