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Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares jumped 8% on Thursday after the Chinese tech giant unveiled its latest AI reasoning model, claiming it outperforms competitors like OpenAI and DeepSeek. The news also helped boost the Hang Seng's China Enterprises Index.
The release of Alibaba’s new AI model comes a day after the launch of a “general AI agent” called Manus by another company. A video on the website dedicated to Manus says the software can carry out complex, multi-step tasks such as screening resumés and creating a website. According to Reuters, Manus is the creation of Chinese company Monica.
The video also says the AI agent is more advanced than a chatbot because it doesn’t only generate ideas but delivers tangible results, such as producing a report recommending properties to buy based on specific criteria.
Alibaba touted its new model, QwQ-32B, in an online statement as delivering “exceptional performance, almost entirely surpassing OpenAI-o1-mini and rivaling the strongest open-source reasoning model, DeepSeek-R1.” OpenAI-o1-mini is the American company’s cost-efficient reasoning model released last year.
Alibaba added the model has achieved a “qualitative leap in mathematics, coding, and general capabilities, with overall performance on par with DeepSeek R1,” it said in the statement.
The company claimed that its model has 32 billion parameters compared with DeepSeek’s R1, which has 671 billion parameters. Fewer parameters imply a model is smaller and more efficient to train.
Alibaba, the owner of Chinese e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall, first launched its ChatGPT-equivalent service Tongyi Qianwen in 2023, after OpenAI launched its industry-defining AI reasoning model.
In January, Alibaba released another model, Qwen 2.5 Max, which it said surpassed the performance of DeepSeek’s highly acclaimed V3 model, released just a few weeks before.
Last week, Alibaba pledged to invest at least 380 billion yuan ($52.4 billion) in its AI and cloud computing infrastructure over the next three years. It said the amount exceeded what it had invested in those areas over the past decade.
