Alibaba gears up Chinese AI competition with launch of DeepSeek rival

Chinese tech giant Alibaba announced Thursday the launch of its AI chatbot, Qwen’s newest AI model, QwQ-32B, which offers “comparable performance” to DeepSeek while requiring significantly less data to operate.

According to a statement from Qwen’s developer team, the new model is based on Scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL), which boasts 671 billion parameters (with 37 billion activated), with 32 billion parameters that achieves performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1.

“Furthermore, we have integrated agent-related capabilities into the reasoning model, enabling it to think critically while utilizing tools and adapting its reasoning based on environmental feedback,” the statement read.

“These advancements not only demonstrate the transformative potential of RL but also pave the way for further innovations in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence.”

The developer team highlighted that QwQ-32B has been tested across multiple benchmarks designed to measure its mathematical reasoning, coding skills, and overall problem-solving abilities.

The results below compare its performance against other leading models, including DeepSeek-R1-Distilled-Qwen-32B, DeepSeek-R1-Distilled-Llama-70B, o1-mini, and the original DeepSeek-R1.

Chinese AI boom rekindled confidence

Alibaba’s stock surged over 8% in the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Wednesday, while it also opened Thursday with a rise by 7% in Hong Kong trade after the launch of the new model.

China’s vast tech industry has enjoyed several weeks of revamped market confidence.

Investors have been riding high on China’s AI capabilities since January, when DeepSeek unveiled a state-of-the-art chatbot seemingly at a fraction of the cost assumed necessary by Western industry leaders.

Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma was seen meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping at a symposium for the country’s leading business figures last month, ending years out of the spotlight.

The billionaire entrepreneur had criticised government regulations in late 2020, shortly before Beijing scuttled Alibaba’s imminent blockbuster IPO.

A broader regulatory crackdown that followed wiped more than a trillion dollars off the value of China’s major tech firms. But Ma’s inclusion in last month’s meeting hinted at his potential public rehabilitation following his tangle with regulators.

DeepSeek’s arrival on the scene this year has pleased authorities, who have intensified efforts to revitalise lacklustre activity in the world’s second-largest economy in recent months.

Alibaba’s QwQ-32B joins another recent entrant, Tencent’s Yuanbao, in an enhanced domestic rivalry with DeepSeek.

In a potential boost for the firm, Beijing promised on Wednesday to enhance support for consumption, which has been sluggish in China since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hangzhou-based Alibaba ─operator of some of China’s top online shopping platforms─ said last month it planned to spend more than $50 billion on AI and cloud computing over the next three years.