Alibaba touts new AI model superior to DeepSeek’s and Meta’s

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. published benchmark scores and touted what it called world-leading performance with its new artificial intelligence model release.

The upgraded Qwen 2.5 Max edition scored better than Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama and DeepSeek’s V3 model in various tests, according to figures in Alibaba Cloud’s announcement on WeChat. Alongside Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc., 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 OpenAI and Anthropic’s models in certain benchmarks.

Cloud service providers like Alibaba and Tencent have slashed their pricing in recent months in the 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 funding at unicorn valuations.