JAKARTA - Chinese technology giant Alibaba released its latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) model, Qwen 2.5-Max, which is claimed to be superior to DeepSeek-V3.

Alibaba launched its AI model right on the Chinese New Year holiday (29/1) yesterday. Some people think that Alibaba's choice of moment shows that the competition in the AI business in China is getting tougher, after DeepSeek shook the United States (US) stock market.

‘Qwen 2.5-Max's performance is superior ... almost exceeding GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Llama-3.1-405B,’ said Alibaba's Cloud Division, in an official announcement on its WeChat account.

Not only Alibaba, ByteDance also released its latest AI model recently. The company that houses the TikTok platform also claims that its AI model is superior to O1, an AI model developed by Microsoft.

The AI competition in China does not stop at these claims, but now also leads to a price war.

This price competition started after DeepSeek made its AI model open-source and set a fairly low price, only 1 yuan per 1 million AI tokens. Alibaba responded by cutting the selling price of some of its AI models by 97%. (KR/LM)