What's Going On With Alibaba Stock Thursday?

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd BABA shares are trading higher Thursday after Alibaba Cloud introduced a new compact reasoning AI model.

What Happened: In a new blog post on Thursday, Alibaba Cloud announced QwQ-32B, a compact reasoning model with 32 billion parameters that delivers performance comparable to other larger models like OpenAI’s o1-mini and DeepSeek’s R1.

The large language model has demonstrated strong performance across multiple measures including AIME 24 (mathematical reasoning), Live CodeBench (coding proficiency), LiveBench (test set contamination and objective evaluation), IFEval (instruction-following ability) and BFCL (tool and function-calling capabilities).

Alibaba noted that reinforcement learning is the core technique behind the model. Through the continuous leveraging of reinforcement learning scaling, QwQ-32B has shown improvements in mathematical reasoning and coding proficiency. The model was also trained to better handle instructions, align with human preferences and offer improved agent performance.

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“The research team has also integrated agent-related capabilities into QwQ-32B, enabling it to think critically, utilize tools effectively, and adapt its reasoning based on environmental feedback. The team is also exploring further integration of agents with RL to enable long-horizon reasoning, aiming to unlock even greater intelligence through inference-time scaling,” the company said in the blog post.

QwQ-32B is currently available for free download as an open-source model on Hugging Face and Model Scope. It’s also accessible through Qwen Chat. 

The news comes after Alibaba shares rallied more than 8.5% on Wednesday. Premier Li Qiang announced increased fiscal stimulus in a speech at the annual meeting of China’s parliament this week. Li reportedly pledged to “vigorously boost” sluggish consumption to keep China on a path towards its 5% growth target in 2025, which may be helping fuel some of the continued momentum.

BABA Price Action: Alibaba shares are up approximately 66% year-to-date. The stock was up 0.79% at $142.14 at the time of publication Thursday, according to Benzinga Pro.

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Photo: courtesy of Alibaba.