Asian countries like China are making huge waves in AI amidst the ongoing technological revolution. Recently, DeepSeek, a Chinese company, released its AI model that surpassed ChatGPT’s performance. Now, the e-commerce giant Alibaba has released its own AI model, Qwen 2.5-Max, which the company claims will beat the performance of Meta, OpenAI, DeepSeek, and other AI models.
Moreover, the company test claims that their AI model secured a leading score of 89.4 on the Arena-Hard benchmark, which evaluates AI models based on their responses to human prompts. Further, the Qwen 2.5-Max outperformed DeepSeek and demonstrated performance comparable to ChatGPT on the MMLU-Pro benchmark, which assesses an AI model’s ability to solve problems at a college level.
According to some developers on Github, “This endeavour holds the promise of enabling our models to transcend human intelligence, unlocking the potential to explore uncharted territories of knowledge and understanding.”
Trump’s Message
The release of the DeepSeek R1 AI model wreaks havoc on the US share market. Leading technology and semiconductor companies lost $1 trillion collectively overnight, led by Nvidia’s fall of market cap by $600 billion in a single day.
President Donald Trump has warned that the impressive performance of Chinese AI models should be a “wake-up call” for Silicon Valley. However, speaking at the Congressional Institute, he emphasised that models like DeepSeek present an opportunity rather than a threat, as they could help reduce costs.
Despite this, broader concerns remain—particularly around censorship. Users have observed that DeepSeek avoids answering questions about sensitive topics, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or whether Chinese President Xi Jinping has ever made a mistake.
