It reflects the broader competitiveness of China’s frontier AI ecosystem,” says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the

B, an AI model rivaling OpenAI and DeepSeek with 98% lower compute costs. A game-changer in AI efficiency, boosting Alibaba’s market position.

Alibaba Cloud on Thursday launched QwQ-32B, a compact reasoning model built on its latest large language model (LLM), Qwen2.5-32b, one it says delivers performance comparable to other large cutting edge models, including Chinese rival DeepSeek and OpenAI’s o1, with only 32 billion parameters.