Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding on Tuesday unveiled a preview of its next reasoning model QwQ-Max, which could rival industry-leading competitors including OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1, heating up the global artificial intelligence (AI) race.
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The Qwen team said that QwQ-Max-Preview – built on the most advanced model of the series, the Qwn 2.5-Max introduced last month – displayed stronger and more versatile reasoning and problem-solving skills. The preview model has been made available for free on the Qwen chatbot website.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Qwen’s latest reasoning model – which belongs to a type of AI system designed to replicate how humans think, make decisions and solve problems – follows Alibaba’s recent announcement of a mega AI infrastructure plan, highlighting the company’s commitment to developing the fast-developing technology.
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China’s Alibaba releases new AI model, said to outperform competitors Deepseek and OpenAI’s GPT-4o
China’s Alibaba releases new AI model, said to outperform competitors Deepseek and OpenAI’s GPT-4o
Alibaba on Monday pledged to invest US$53 billion on cloud and AI infrastructure over the next three years, marking China’s largest-ever computing project financed by a single private business. The move is set to fuel competition in the domestic AI market as local companies across various industries, as well as government agencies, rush to embrace DeepSeek’s open-source R1 reasoning model.
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