Chinese technology company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) yesterday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence (AI) model that it said surpassed the highly acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.
The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek’s (深度求索) meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc’s most advanced open-source AI models.
Photo: Bloomberg
The Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese start-up’s purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the US.
However, DeepSeek’s success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models.
Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) released an update to its flagship AI model, which it said outperformed Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.
This echoed DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 model rivaled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks.
The predecessor of DeepSeek’s V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released in May last year.
The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan (US$0.14) per 1 million tokens — or units of data processed by the AI model — led to Alibaba’s cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97 percent on a range of models.
Other Chinese tech companies followed suit, including Baidu Inc (百度), which released China’s first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023, and the country’s most valuable Internet company, Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊).
Liang Wenfeng (梁文鋒), DeepSeek’s enigmatic founder, said in a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July last year that the start-up “did not care” about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal.
OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
Liang said he believed China’s largest tech companies might not be well suited to the future of the AI industry, contrasting their high costs and top-down structures with DeepSeek’s lean operation and loose management style.
“Large foundational models require continued innovation, tech giants’ capabilities have their limits,” he said.
UNCERTAINTY: Investors remain worried that trade negotiations with Washington could go poorly, given Trump’s inconsistency on tariffs in his second term, experts said The consumer confidence index this month fell for a ninth consecutive month to its lowest level in 13 months, as global trade uncertainties and tariff risks cloud Taiwan’s economic outlook, a survey released yesterday by National Central University found. The biggest decline came from the timing for stock investments, which plunged 11.82 points to 26.82, underscoring bleak investor confidence, it said. “Although the TAIEX reclaimed the 21,000-point mark after the US and China agreed to bury the hatchet for 90 days, investors remain worried that the situation would turn sour later,” said Dachrahn Wu (吳大任), director of the university’s Research Center for
Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designer specializing in artificial-intelligence (AI) chips, yesterday said that small-volume production of 3-nanometer (nm) chips for a key customer is on track to start by the end of this year, dismissing speculation about delays in producing advanced chips. As Alchip is transitioning from 7-nanometer and 5-nanometer process technology to 3 nanometers, investors and shareholders have been closely monitoring whether the company is navigating through such transition smoothly. “We are proceeding well in [building] this generation [of chips]. It appears to me that no revision will be required. We have achieved success in designing
PROJECTION: KGI Financial said that based on its foreign exchange exposure, a NT$0.1 increase in the New Taiwan dollar would negatively impact it by about NT$1.7 billion KGI Financial Holding Co (凱基金控) yesterday said its life insurance arm has increased hedging and adopted other moves to curb the impact of the local currency’s appreciation on its profitability. “It is difficult to accurately depict the hedging costs, which might vary from 7 percent to 40 percent in a single day,” KGI Life Insurance Co (凱基人壽) told an investors’ conference in Taipei. KGI Life, which underpinned 66 percent of the group’s total net income last year, has elevated hedging to 55 to 60 percent, while using a basket of currencies to manage currency volatility, the insurer said. As different
Taiwanese insurers are facing difficult questions about the damage of recent swings in the New Taiwan dollar. Regulators might have a partial solution: letting firms change how they calculate the value of foreign currency assets. The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) is considering allowing insurers to use six-month average exchange rates when they calculate risk-based capital in their semiannual reports, a shift from the current system where insurers use exchange rates on the final day of reporting. The change could ease pressure on the US$1.2 trillion insurance sector, whose huge exposure to foreign assets came into the spotlight earlier this month after a