Alibaba unveils Qwen3 AI models that it says outperform DeepSeek R1

Alibaba Group Holding on Tuesday unveiled the highly anticipated third generation of its open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model series, which promises faster processing and enhanced multilingual capabilities, intensifying competition in an already crowded Chinese market.

The Qwen3 family consists of eight models, ranging from 600 million parameters to 235 billion, with enhancements across all models, according to the Qwen team at Alibaba’s cloud computing unit. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

In AI, parameters are a measurement of the variables present during model training. They serve as an indicator of sophistication: larger parameter sizes typically suggest greater capacity.

Benchmark tests cited by Alibaba revealed that models such as Qwen3-235B and Qwen3-4B matched or exceeded the performance of advanced models from both domestic and overseas competitors – including OpenAI’s o1, Google’s Gemini and DeepSeek’s R1 – in areas like instruction following, coding assistance, text generation, mathematical skills and complex problem solving.

The launch of Qwen3, which was anticipated this month as previously reported by the Post, is expected to solidify Alibaba’s position as a leading provider of open-source models. With over 100,000 derivative models built upon it, Qwen is currently the world’s largest open-source AI ecosystem, surpassing Facebook parent Meta Platforms’ Llama community.

  

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