(AFP) – Chinese tech and e-commerce giant Alibaba on Wednesday announced the release of Qwen2.5-Max, an advanced artificial intelligence model that the company says outperforms several leading AI systems in key benchmarks.

The launch follows Chinese startup DeepSeek’s recent release of models that stunned Silicon Valley and challenged assumptions about US dominance in the booming AI sector.

The rapid emergence of consecutive Chinese models will likely intensify concerns in the United States, where companies have invested billions of dollars in AI development that startups in China are matching at significantly lower costs.

In a blog post, the Qwen team said their new model outperformed DeepSeek V3 in multiple tests, including code generation and general capabilities, while showing competitive results against industry leaders like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude-3.5-Sonnet.

The model, trained on over 20 trillion tokens of data, notably was not compared with DeepSeek’s R3 model — the reasoning-focused AI that made waves when it launched through a chatbot on January 20.

Qwen2.5-Max is now available to developers through Alibaba Cloud services and can be accessed via Qwen Chat, the company’s conversational AI platform. The system offers compatibility with OpenAI’s API format, potentially simplifying adoption for organizations already using similar AI services.