Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA) shares are trading higher Thursday as the company's latest artificial intelligence model, Qwen 2.5, gained traction.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. published benchmark scores and touted what it called world-leading performance with its new artificial intelligence model release.

Alibaba says the latest version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model can take on fellow Chinese firm DeepSeek's V3 as well as the top models from U.S. rivals OpenAI and Meta.

Analysts say China’s AI investment is just beginning to pay off, with more firms expected to launch their own models soon.

There’s been an escalation in the generative AI large language model “wars” as Alibaba Qwen 2.5 launched Wednesday. This latest AI salvo from China-based Alibaba is directly aimed at its in-country rival DeepSeek, which launched its own AI--DeepSeek-V3--in December 2024 and its R1 version in mid-January.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of China’s Alibaba Group Ltd., has released its latest breakthrough artificial intelligence large language model just in time for the Chinese New Year: Qwen 2.5-Max, which it claims surpasses today’s most powerful AI models.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) released a new version Wednesday of its Qwen large language model, known as Qwen2.5 Max, which it said topped DeepSeek's AI model across various benchmarks.

By Eduardo Baptista BEIJING (Reuters) -Chinese tech company Alibaba on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.

Alibaba says it's new artificial intelligence model is superior to DeepSeek. It says the Qwen 2.5 Max edition scored better than Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama and DeepSeek’s V3 model in various tests. Matthew Bloxham of Bloomberg Intelligence is on ".