Chinese tech giant Alibaba has released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 AI model that it claims is better than DeepSeek.
The company in a WeChat post on 28 January said the model also outperforms other top AI chatbots including ChatGPT- 4o.
This is coming just a few days after DeepSeek came into limelight, raising questions of intended competition.
A battle of AI models
DeepSeek first launched just a few weeks ago and took the AI space by storm, immediately topping the list of the most popular free apps on the Apple Store in the U.S.
The open source chatbot was said to be better than ChatGPT-4o, the most advanced version of OpenAI ‘s ChatGPT.
Perhaps the biggest challenge DeepSeek posed to the AI industry particularly in the U.S. was that it was built with just $6 million in contrast to ChatGPT which gulped $100 million.
The app has received the praise of key figures in the U.S., including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who promised to release better ChatGPT models, and President Donald Trump who has challenged the U.S. to step up its AI game.
Alibaba is now on the spot with claims that its new AI model beats this widely accepted chatbot also of Chinese origin.
The company’s cloud unit wrote on its official WeChat account that the new model outperforms “almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B.”
Although Alibaba’s AI isn’t as popular as ChatGPT or DeepSeek, this claim means it may be about to break out but that remains to be seen.
AI evolving fast
AI is quickly taking over in all aspects of human endeavor, hence the competition for AI companies to stay ahead.
As part of this effort, OpenAI, the biggest AI company in the U.S. launched ChatGPT Gov for U.S. government agencies, thus bringing even the government into the AI space.
President Trump himself has announced a $500 billion AI project named Stargate, which Sam Altman is a key part of.