ChatGPT’s biggest rival might not be DeepSeek: This is the new Chinese AI model by Alibaba

The Chinese tech giant Alibaba is out to rival DeepSeek and OpenAI for supremacy in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, having last week released a new reasoning model that it says challenges those of both competitors.

What’s more, Alibaba’s AI drive has seen it partner with a fellow Chinese company that this month launched what it described as the world’s “first general AI agent”.

“Once-in-a-generation” AI opportunity

The moves come on the back of Alibaba’s announcement that it plans to invest $53 billion in advancing its AI capabilities over the next three years, with CEO Eddie Wu heralding the arrival of a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity.

Alibaba, which launched its first reasoning model in 2023, revealed last Thursday that it was releasing its latest version, Tongyi Qianwen QwQ-32B, boasting that the model’s performance is “comparable to DeepSeek-R1”.

QwQ-32B, which is available for internet users to download for free, “has achieved a qualitative leap in mathematics, coding, and general capabilities”, the company said in a statement.

Alibaba added that the new model “can not only provide extremely strong reasoning capabilities, but also meet lower resource consumption requirements”.

In January, in what has been described as a “Sputnik moment” in AI, DeepSeek’s low-cost, energy-efficient R1 reasoning model caused a global splash when it was released by the Chinese startup.

The Hangzhou-based firm said it had developed R1 at a cost of just $6 million - a fraction of the more than $100 million that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed it cost the American AI company to train its chatbot ChatGPT-4.

In Thursday’s announcement of QwQ-32B’s release, Alibaba noted that the reasoning model’s performance in benchmark tests “almost completely” surpassed OpenAI-o1-mini, the cost-efficient model rolled out by OpenAI last year.

Alibaba links up with general AI upstart

When it made its AI-investment pledge late last month, Alibaba added that the company’s “primary long-term objective” is the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI is a highly autonomous form of AI capable of executing a wider range of tasks than standard chatbots, with fewer prompts.

A general AI agent “can operate as a digital employee”, according to a Reuters description.

And on Tuesday, it emerged that Alibaba has entered into an alliance with the AI firm Manus, which last week released a general AI agent whose impact has been likened to that of DeepSeek, per MIT’s Caiwei Chen.

Currently downloadable only by invitation, the agent “bridges minds and actions”, its developers say. “It doesn’t just think, it delivers results. Manus excels at various tasks in work and life, getting everything done while you rest.”

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