BEIJING, March 6 – Alibaba Group’s (9988.HK) shares listed in Hong Kong surged by over 8% on Thursday following the release of its artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning model, which the company claims performs similarly to DeepSeek’s R1, a globally recognized model.
In a post on X, Alibaba’s AI division announced that its QwQ-32B, with 32 billion parameters, demonstrates comparable capabilities to DeepSeek’s R1 model, which boasts 671 billion parameters.
The Chinese government, recognizing the accelerating global adoption of AI models, pledged increased support for key industries, including artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, and 6G telecom, on Wednesday.
Alibaba’s new model is available through its chatbot service, Qwen Chat, where users can select various Qwen models, including the Qwen2.5-Max, the most powerful language model in the Qwen series.
QwQ-32B has shown impressive performance in benchmark tests on mathematical reasoning, coding, and general problem-solving. According to Alibaba, its performance is close to that of top models like OpenAI’s o1 mini and DeepSeek’s R1.
DeepSeek has risen as a prominent symbol of China’s advancements in AI. It competes with leading models from OpenAI with a fraction of the cost and less powerful computing resources.
Additionally, another AI release gained considerable attention on Thursday: Manus, an AI agent created by the Chinese startup Monica. The company claims that Manus outperformed ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s Deep Research in a benchmark for AI assistants.
An AI agent is an advanced iteration of a chatbot. Based on provided use cases on its website, Manus can assist users with tasks such as planning a trip to Japan or conducting a comparative analysis of insurance policies.
The AI agent is currently available by invitation only. A video released by the Chinese startup on X late on Wednesday demonstrating how it works received over 280,000 views by Thursday, with many users requesting invitations.
Reporting by Che Pan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala and Barbara Lewis
