Alibaba’s AI breakthrough boosts shares

• Published On: 06 March 2025 at 18:21

Alibaba Group's latest artificial intelligence (AI) development boosted its Hong Kong-listed shares by more than 8% on Thursday.

The surge followed the company's announcement of its new AI reasoning model, QwQ-32B, which it claims competes with the well-known DeepSeek R1.

In a post on X, Alibaba's AI division revealed that the QwQ-32B model, with 32 billion parameters, performs similarly to DeepSeek's R1, despite the latter's 671 billion parameters. The model is now available via Alibaba's chatbot service, Qwen Chat, where users can select from a variety of Qwen models, including the most advanced in the series, Qwen2.5-Max.

In benchmark tests, QwQ-32B outperformed industry-leading models such as OpenAI's o1 mini and DeepSeek R1 in terms of mathematical reasoning, coding, and problem solving.

The announcement coincides with China's growing commitment to AI development. On Wednesday, the Chinese government announced increased funding for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, and 6G telecommunications.

Meanwhile, another AI release making waves on Thursday was Manus, an AI agent created by Chinese startup Monica. The company claimed that Manus outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research on an AI assistant benchmark.

Unlike traditional chatbots, AI agents like Manus provide more advanced capabilities, assisting users with tasks such as travel planning and insurance policy comparisons. A demonstration video posted on X late Wednesday attracted over 280,000 views and many requests for access, but it is currently only available by invitation.