DEEPSEEK'S AI DOMINANCE IN CHINA CHALLENGED AS ALIBABA'S QWEN GAINS GROUND

China's generative AI race is intensifying as Alibaba's Qwen model family emerges as a serious rival to DeepSeek, the current domestic leader in large language model development.

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While DeepSeek has drawn attention for its rapid technical progress and early open-source releases, Alibaba's latest updates to its Qwen series position the e-commerce giant as a direct challenger in both performance and commercial deployment. The battle reflects a broader shift in China's Al ecosystem, where major tech players are racing to localize, scale, and monetize foundational models to reduce reliance on U.S. technologies amid tightening export controls and rising strategic competition.

ALIBABA’S QWEN-2 SURGES AHEAD ON BENCHMARKS

The latest version of Alibaba’s model, Qwen-2, has posted competitive results across key language understanding and reasoning benchmarks. Open evaluations show Qwen-2 outperforming DeepSeek's flagship models on tasks including MMLU, GSM8K, and HellaSwag—indicators of a model’s reasoning, math, and commonsense capabilities.

Qwen-2 has also shown strong multilingual performance, particularly in Chinese-English translation and cross-lingual tasks, a key advantage for Alibaba’s global-facing businesses. It supports context lengths up to 128K tokens, making it ideal for enterprise applications that require long-document processing, such as legal and financial analysis.