Alibaba's Qwen offers cheaper alternative to DeepSeek

Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd's Qwen model offers a low-cost DeepSeek alternative as US computer scientists have successfully developed a new reasoning model that has been trained for less than $50 with the help of Alibaba's open-source technology.

Several researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley have trained their AI models on the back of Alibaba's Qwen 2.5-32b- Instruct model to lower the costs of AI training, according to a research paper.

The capabilities of Alibaba's model provide the latest evidence of China's growing technological prowess in the fast-developing AI sector, experts said. The move also comes after Chinese AI startup DeepSeek took the world by surprise through the release of its high-performance and cost-efficient open-source AI model R1.

Alibaba launched its open-source Qwen 2.5 series models, ranging from 0.5 billion to 72 billion parameters in September. The models boast enhanced capabilities in math and coding, and are able to support over 29 languages.