The AI announcements – especially from China – seem to be coming thick and fast at the moment, with Alibaba hitting the headlines today.
Only a month ago, Chinese eCommerce giant, Alibaba, announced an AI model it claimed outperformed ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Now the company has unveiled a new version of its AI assistant app.
The new launch is powered by the company’s Qwen AI reasoning model, which the company is pushing to take on OpenAI and its homegrown (and controversial) rival, DeepSeek. This LLM is also being used by Chinese startup, Manus, for what is being claimed to be “a completely autonomous agent”.
What Has Alibaba Launched?
The company’s stocks surged upon the announcement of QwQ-32B, which is free to download and use, even commercially. Alibaba says that it is “very suitable for application scenarios with rapid response or high data security requirements.” It adds that it can be “easily deployed” to local devices “on consumer-grade hardware”.
The key update is that this AI assistant uses the Qwen LLMs as opposed to the company’s Quark reasoning model.
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In a blog post (in Chinese), the company says that this latest launch “has achieved a qualitative leap in mathematics, code, and general capabilities”. Alibaba also took a swipe at DeepSeek, claiming its new AI assistant is “comparable to DeepSeek-R1”. It also claims that its latest launch “almost completely surpass[ed] OpenAI-o1-mini”.
High Ambitions for Alibaba’s App
CNBC news reports that Alibaba is planning on investing $380 billion yuan ($52.5 billion) in cloud computing and its AI infrastructure over the next three years.
Its launches have been arriving rapidly and the company is keen to emphasize that its products are as good – if not better – than rivals. It says in the blog post: “As of now, the number of derivative models of Qwen in domestic and overseas AI open source communities has exceeded 100,000, surpassing the American Llama series of models to become the world’s largest open source model group.”
Its AI ambitions are having a huge impact on the company’s bottom line. In February, CNBC reported on Alibaba’s quarterly results. The company’s Cloud Intelligence Group had seen year-on-year sales growth of 13% to 31.742 billion yuan (over $4 billion). “The AI era presents a clear and massive demand for infrastructure. We will aggressively invest in AI infrastructure,” said Alibaba CEO, Eddie Wu.
Chinese AI Dominance
However, will Alibaba be allowed to push for dominance outside of China? DeepSeek is facing deep mistrust and has already been banned in several countries over national security concerns. In particular, the fact that users’ data is stored in China is causing concern.
There is also the Trump administration’s strong backing for American AI ventures. Accusations that DeepSeek has been using OpenAI’s output to train its own models is likely to see relations worsen.
However, DeepSeek has yet to be fully banned in the US – only from some Government devices. While the focus is on DeepSeek, Alibaba is merrily launching products and doesn’t seem to be attracting the same heat…for now.
