Days after DeepSeek took the internet by storm, Chinese tech company Alibaba announced Qwen 2.5-Max, the latest of its LLM series. The unveiling of this open-source agent can easily be perceived as a direct challenge to DeepSeek and domestic rivals. The release is on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people have taken time off work to celebrate and spend time with their families. Alibaba seems to be sending the message that they are hard at work while their competition takes the day off.
As we've seen, DeepSeek's emergence has been nothing short of disruptive and Alibaba's new release is sure to cause a stir as well. DeepSeek introduced the R1 model, which delivers performance comparable to leading models like OpenAI's ChatGPT but at a fraction of the development cost. The impact of DeepSeek's innovation was profound, leading to a substantial decline in the market value of major tech companies, including a $593 billion drop for Nvidia—the largest in U.S. stock market history.
The latest from Alibaba comes when the AI industry is witnessing a surge in open-source contributions, allowing researchers and developers worldwide to access and build upon its technology. This move has been lauded for promoting transparency and collaboration in AI development. However, it also puts the power of AI freely into anyone’s hands, which could lead to numerous safety and privacy issues.
Scalability and open source
With an emphasis on the model's scalability, Qwen 2.5 has been pre-trained on over 20 trillion tokens and further refined through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback. The company has announced the availability of Qwen 2.5's API through Alibaba Cloud, inviting developers and businesses to integrate its advanced capabilities into their applications.
Similar to DeepSeek’s approach, Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 is built upon the “mix of experts” architecture and aims to not only match but surpass the capabilities of DeepSeek's offerings. This design allows the model to selectively engage different subsets of its parameters, enhancing computational efficiency and enabling the handling of more complex tasks without a proportional increase in resource consumption.
What's next
It's easy to think that with the rise of these entities aiming to develop more efficient and powerful models, we will continue to see more open-source models unveiled shortly. The ultimate beneficiaries will likely be users who will experience increasingly sophisticated AI applications without the barriers of other chatbots within the category. Alibaba is carefully positioning itself as a key player in democratizing AI.
By embracing innovative architectures and open-source principles, Alibaba is responding to the challenges posed by nimble startups like DeepSeek and contributing to the broader advancement of AI technology.
More from Tom's Guide
- Microsoft just announced that it's bringing DeepSeek R1 models to Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs
- Forget OpenAI Operator — here's an open source AI agent system that works brilliantly for free
- It doesn't matter if DeepSeek copied OpenAI — the damage has already been done in the AI arms race
