There’s been an escalation in the generative AI large language model “wars” as Alibaba Qwen 2.5 launched Wednesday. This latest AI salvo from China-based Alibaba is directly aimed at its in-country rival DeepSeek, which launched its own AI — DeepSeek-V3 — in December and its R1 version earlier this month.

Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, released a new version of its AI model and made big claims — notably that it outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT and the newly ascending DeepSeek. "Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms

Max's release points to the pressure DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on overseas rivals and domestic competition.