Analysts say China’s AI investment is just beginning to pay off, with more firms expected to launch their own models soon.

There’s been an escalation in the generative AI large language model “wars” as Alibaba Qwen 2.5 launched Wednesday. This latest AI salvo from China-based Alibaba is directly aimed at its in-country rival DeepSeek, which launched its own AI--DeepSeek-V3--in December 2024 and its R1 version in mid-January.

In case all the buzz about DeepSeek over the past week wasn't enough, Alibaba Cloud launched Qwen 2.5-Max, a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence model designed to outperform industry leaders like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3.