Alibaba touts AI model as better than DeepSeek, OpenAI products, driving stock surge

Following the launch of its QwQ-32B model, Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares surged 7.2 per cent to HK$139.30 in Thursday morning trading. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Despite its relatively modest 32 billion parameters, Alibaba’s new model matched or outperformed DeepSeek’s R1, which boasts 671 billion parameters, in areas such as mathematics, coding and general problem-solving, according to a blog post by the team responsible for Alibaba’s Qwen family of AI models.

A smaller parameter count enables the model to operate with reduced computing resource requirements, facilitating wider adoption, according to the team.

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China’s Alibaba releases new AI model, said to outperform competitors Deepseek and OpenAI’s GPT-4o

China’s Alibaba releases new AI model, said to outperform competitors Deepseek and OpenAI’s GPT-4o

The release of Alibaba’s latest reasoning model – a type of AI system designed to think, reflect and self-critique to solve complex problems – comes less than two months after DeepSeek’s R1 shook the global tech industry and stock markets in January.