There’s been an escalation in the generative AI large language model “wars” as Alibaba Qwen 2.5 launched Wednesday. This latest AI salvo from China-based Alibaba is directly aimed at its in-country rival DeepSeek, which launched its own AI--DeepSeek-V3--in December 2024 and its R1 version in mid-January.

Max's release points to the pressure DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on overseas rivals and domestic competition.

Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, released a new version of its AI model and made big claims — notably that it outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT and the newly ascending DeepSeek.