Alibaba unveils latest AI model

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd took the wraps off a new version of its flagship Qwen Al model, sustaining the breakneck pace of development that’s characterised China's artificial intelligence sphere in the wake of DeepSeek.

- LUZ DING

Alibaba yesterday unveiled its Qwen3 series of models, which it said rivals DeepSeek's performance on several fronts, including math and coding. Qwen3 also significantly cuts deployment costs compared to other major models, the company said.

The Qwen3 series includes two so-called mixture-of-experts (MoE) models that are trying to match hybrid reasoning systems — which mimic the way humans think through problems — recently introduced by Anthropic and Alphabet Inc's Google. DeepSeek and other developers have also used the MoE technique, which divides tasks into smaller sets of data, very much like having a team of specialists who each focus on a segment of a job, thereby making the process more efficient.