Alibaba Cloud Bolsters AI Offerings To Competes Globally With New LLMs

Alibaba Group Holding’s BABA cloud division is upgrading its artificial intelligence tool package, which is available overseas through its Singapore availability zones.

Alibaba’s cloud unit is expanding its platform-as-a-service options and enhancing its international lineup with its latest proprietary large language models, including Qwen-Max and the DeepSeek-like QwQ-Plus reasoning model, Bloomberg reports.

Alibaba and its peers launched successive affordable business intelligence tools for developers that cost just $1 per year for individuals since the Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek emerged in January, claiming to outdo OpenAI models at a fraction of their cost.

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Alibaba unveiled a new version of its Quark AI assistant that integrates functions like a chatbot, deep thinking, and task execution.

Alibaba also launched a new suite of software-as-a-service products.

Alibaba is set to release the Qwen 3 flagship model by April.

The performance difference of Chinese models compared with their U.S. counterparts measured under AI evaluating benchmarks shrank from double digits in 2023 to near parity in 2024, SCMP cited from Stanford Institute for Human-Centred AI report.

Chinese Big Tech, including Alibaba’s Qwen series, DeepSeek’s V3 foundational model, and its R1 reasoning model, ranked in the global top 15 in terms of notable AI models for 2024.

Contrastingly, Meta Platforms Inc’s META release of its latest Llama 4 model drew controversy for allegedly boosting scores on specific benchmarks.

Reportedly, DeepSeek, in collaboration with Tsinghua University researchers, developed a technique to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) that combines generative reward modeling (GRM) and self-principled critique tuning.

The emergence of DeepSeek and claims of affordable AI models fueled a domestic price war.

Price Action: BABA stock is down 0.78% at $98.59 at the last check on Wednesday.

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