Alibaba’s updated Qwen AI model overtakes DeepSeek’s V3 in chatbot ranking

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding’s latest open-source Qwen artificial intelligence (AI) model surpassed DeepSeek-V3 to become the top-ranked non-reasoning model from a Chinese developer, according to a third-party benchmarking and ranking platform, highlighting the rapid pace of Chinese firms’ advance in the emerging technology.

Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen2.5-Max, launched during the Lunar New Year holiday, has climbed to seventh place on Chatbot Arena, a benchmarking project developed by computer scientists from UC Berkeley to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Rankings are determined by users voting on the quality of the output. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

DeepSeek-V3, which the namesake Chinese start-up launched in late December to the shock of the global tech community, is currently ranked ninth.

“Alibaba’s Qwen [2.5] Max is strong across domains,” Chatbot Arena said in a post on X. The model performs especially well in the technical areas, including coding, maths and hard prompts, which are used to elicit more direct and well-defined responses from chatbots, the organisation added.

It also said that the latest Qwen model matches top proprietary models such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Claude from Anthropic, backed by Amazon.com.

  

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