Alibaba just dropped Qwen 2.5-Max, claiming it outperforms DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o, and Meta’s Llama-3.1-405B. Bold move, right?

Here’s what’s going on:

DeepSeek made waves by launching AI models that are fast, cheap, and shockingly good so good that some U.S. tech stocks took a hit.

Alibaba wasn’t about to sit back they fired back with Qwen 2.5-Max, a massive model trained on 20 trillion tokens, claiming dominance in coding, reasoning, and human-like responses.

Investors took notice Alibaba’s stock jumped over 4% after the announcement, while analysts are betting big on its AI future.

The industry is watching closely DeepSeek’s rise forced AI giants to rethink their pricing and innovation strategies. Some are even worried that DeepSeek’s aggressive cost-cutting might have come with some… let’s say, questionable shortcuts.