Alibaba Group’s latest artificial intelligence (AI) development sent its Hong Kong-listed shares soaring over 8% on Thursday.
The surge followed the company’s announcement of its new AI reasoning model, QwQ-32B, which it claims rivals the widely recognized DeepSeek R1.
In a post on X, Alibaba’s AI division revealed that the QwQ-32B model, with 32 billion parameters, delivers performance comparable to DeepSeek’s R1, despite the latter boasting 671 billion parameters. The model is now accessible through Alibaba’s chatbot service, Qwen Chat, where users can choose from various Qwen models, including Qwen2.5-Max, the most advanced in the series.