Alibaba AI "Qwen"

DeepSeek shock is followed by next challenger

A few days after the "DeepSeek" shock, another artificial intelligence (AI) from China is making headlines. Amazon rival Alibaba presented a new version of its AI "Qwen" on Wednesday, which is said to be superior to the competition.

Qwen 2.5-Max almost consistently outperforms DeepSeek's "V3" and the latest versions of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's Llama, the online retailer's cloud division wrote on the short messaging service WeChat.

The launch of Qwen at the start of the Chinese New Year is unusual, as many Chinese spend the holidays with their families. This points to the growing competitive pressure - not only from US companies, but also within the People's Republic.

Excitement about DeepSeek
DeepSeek caused a worldwide stir at the beginning of the week because significantly less computing power than usual is required to train and operate the start-up's AI. The development costs would therefore be significantly lower than those for ChatGPT & Co. A few days ago, TikTok parent company ByteDance also presented a new AI that is said to be superior to ChatGPT.

A price war between AI providers has been raging in China for months. The trigger was the release of "V2", the predecessor of DeepSeek's current AI "V3". In response, Alibaba and other technology companies such as Baidu and Tencent reduced the prices for using their respective AI programs by up to 97%.