First DeepSeek, now Qwen2.5-Max—China's AI push has the internet saying "OpenAI is truly cooked"

While everyone was busy making memes about AI taking other AIs' jobs, Alibaba dropped Qwen2.5-Max. The Chinese tech giant claims their new AI model is apparently leaving some heavyweight champions in the dust. We're talking about DeepSeek-V3, OpenAI's GPT-4, and Meta's Llama-3.1.

Qwen2.5-Max has reportedly been trained on over 20 trillion tokens. It underwent an intense boot camp featuring Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

In non-nerd terms, this means it was spoon-fed wisdom and then told to figure things out on its own like a responsible adult. It reportedly outperforms DeepSeek V3 in various benchmarks, and when pitted against GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2.5-Max has outdone itself.

The internet, on the other hand, went absolutely wild.

One X user (@AdrianDittamann /X) straight up declared:

“Yeah, OpenAI is truly cooked.”

Referring to the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, a user (@indika1337 / X)stated:

“Someone check on sam.”

One particularly spicy comment (by @BayesianNuance /X) wondered:

“How many of these are in the near-term Chinese pipeline?”

With another Sam Altman meme, a user (@SynquoteIntern / X) stated:

“Another Chinese model has hit the timeline."

A user (@Mira_Network /X) posted a meme of the current state of AI.

A comment (by @shurensha /X) read: “Man OpenAI can't catch a break.”

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Introduction to Qwen2.5-Max

Let's discuss Qwen2.5-Max, which came fresh from Alibaba. And, it is not here to sell discounted electronics on AliExpress.

This digital brainiac just rolled up on Alibaba Cloud Bailian's platform. It features developer realness with its interactive chat features that supposedly make other AI models look basic.

This model utilizes a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which allows it to scale effectively and enhance its intelligence by leveraging a larger dataset.

Developers can access Qwen2.5-Max through Alibaba Cloud services, specifically via the Qwen Chat platform. The API is designed to be compatible with OpenAI's API format, facilitating easier integration for organizations already using similar AI technologies.

In simpler terms, if you’ve used ChatGPT or similar AI before, integrating Qwen2.5-Max will be a breeze. In way simpler terms, if you already know how to press Power and Volume Up on one remote, you won’t need a new instruction manual for the other

While U.S. tech giants are out there burning through cash, Alibaba's being surprisingly frugal.

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The $5.6M AI that shook Wall Street

DeepSeek just dropped into the tech scene with a cost of $5.6 million and runs on budget GPUs.

While everyone thought you needed a small country's GDP to build a decent AI model, DeepSeek R1 showed up with pocket change, well comparatively.

This budget-friendly brainiac didn't just match the performance of its expensive cousins, using Nvidia's less flashy GPUs, DeepSeek R1 proved that sometimes less is more.

Wall Street had a full-on panic attack as Nvidia's stock dropped 17% and lost nearly $600 billion in market value, and the tech market scrutinized its expensive AI investments.

This whole situation has investors asking some uncomfortable questions, like, maybe we didn't need to spend build-a-small-city money on AI development? The awkward silence from tech giants is loud.