Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba unveiled a new artificial intelligence model on Wednesday, claiming it outperforms its competitor DeepSeek.
The timely announcement comes after Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek on Monday rocked markets and sparked a sell-off in technology products in the US and Europe after the company said its artificial intelligence is more cost-effective and performs better than leading US models.
Alibaba now claims that its new open-source AI model, Qwen 2.5-Max, is even more impressive than DeepSeek's, putting pressure on its domestic and overseas competitors.
The e-commerce giant said Qwen 2.5-Max is also capable of outperforming OpenAI's GPT-4 and Meta's Llama-3.1-405B (META).
Alibaba's share price is up 1.2 % at the time of writing, with its stock up 25 % in six months. Investors will be watching to see how the quest for dominance in the AI space unfolds as competition heats up among the tech titans.
Risk of renewed trade war between the US and China
As reported on Tuesday by server Euronews Business, U.S. President Donald Trump said after the DeepSeek update that the breakthrough is a "wake-up call" for U.S. tech companies and that the U.S. needs to "laser-focus on the competition." He also expressed confidence that US tech companies will maintain their dominance in the artificial intelligence sector.
Trump's return, meanwhile, has reignited fears of a trade war between the US and China No. 2. "For now, it's safe to say that today has prompted a reassessment of the 'AI trade' and the risks of a trade war between the US and China," by Kyle Rodd, chief market analyst at Compital.com, in a report to clients.
President Trump has not yet imposed the 60 % tariff on Chinese imports that he promised during his campaign. Instead, his administration has launched an assessment, the findings of which are expected by April 1.
euronews/ gnews - RoZ
PHOTO by zhang hui on Unsplash
English 
Czech 
Spanish 
French 
Italian 
German 
Russian