Alibaba Unveils a Challenger to DeepSeek

On January 28, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released a new version of its AI model, Qwen 2.5, which developers claim is more powerful than DeepSeek-V3.

According to the company’s cloud division, Qwen 2.5-Max surpasses GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B in nearly all metrics.

The neural network was trained using over 20 trillion tokens. It is accessible via API or through the Qwen Chat chatbot.

Two days before the release, Alibaba introduced a new family of models, Qwen2.5-VL, capable of analyzing text and images. These neural networks can understand videos, files, count objects in images, and operate a computer similarly to OpenAI’s AI agent.

Benchmark tests indicate that the most powerful neural network, Qwen2.5-VL, outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash on several criteria.

Philipp Schmid, Technical Lead at Hugging Face, demonstrated how Qwen2.5-VL launched the Booking service and booked a flight ticket.

Don’t Miss @Alibaba_Qwen 2.5 VL! Despite all the Deepseek Hype, Qwen just dropped the best open Multimodal! Qwen 2.5 VL is a Vision Language Model that can control your computer, similar to the @OpenAI operator, extract structured information from charts, and more!!

TL;DR;
3️⃣… pic.twitter.com/GeEGVdl0tI

— Philipp Schmid (@_philschmid) January 27, 2025

The recent launch of the Chinese AI model DeepSeek-R1 caused a stir on social media, a stock market tumble, and debates about a leadership change in the artificial intelligence sector. The startup demonstrated that China is no longer merely a follower.

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has vowed to surpass DeepSeek.