Chinese artificial intelligence models DeepSeek and Qwen have surged ahead of Western rivals, including GPT, with returns exceeding 100 per cent in just nine days during an ongoing real-market cryptocurrency trading competition.
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DeepSeek’s Chat V3.1 model grew its initial capital of US$10,000 to US$22,900 by 2pm on Monday – a 126 per cent gain since trading began on October 18 – according to the latest update from Alpha Arena, a crypto investment project launched on Friday by US research firm Nof1.
Qwen 3 Max, developed by Alibaba Group Holding, followed with a 108 per cent gain, doubling its account value to US$20,850. Qwen briefly overtook DeepSeek between October 24 and 26 before ceding its lead on Monday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
By contrast, OpenAI’s GPT-5 was the worst performer so far, losing nearly 60 per cent of its capital with about US$4,000 remaining. Google DeepMind’s Gemini 2.5 Pro showed a similar 57 per cent loss, while xAI’s Grok 4 and Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Sonnet posted returns of 14 per cent and 23 per cent respectively.
The competition, which runs until November 3, tests the investment abilities of six AI models, each given US$10,000 in starting capital along with identical prompts and market data.
Their task is to maximise returns by trading cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, ether and dogecoin, according to Nof1.