India, Jan. 31 -- The AI battle in China is getting intense. During the Lunar New Year, Alibaba released an AI model-Qwen 2.5-Max. The release timing is likely due to the pressure from DeepSeek, an AI startup that is rising fast and is going to shake up the domestic and global markets with its recent progress.

Alibaba claims Qwen 2.5-Max beats OpenAI's GPT-4o, Meta Llama 3.1 405B, and DeepSeek-V3 model in most AI benchmarks. And this is another big step for Alibaba to catch up with the western AI giants in China.

Just this month, DeepSeek was exposed and launched DeepSeek-V3, followed by R1 on January 20. With reports showing the two systems can do things as complex as OpenAI's bare cost, the situation got intense in the competitive bat...