Qwen

Following DeepSeek's rapid ascent,MKsports another Chinese large language model (LLM), Alibaba Cloud's Qwen2.5-Max, has achieved impressive results on Chatbot Arena, a platform for evaluating LLMs and AI chatbots, entering the global top 10 for the first time, with a strong performance in coding and math.

In the early hours of Tuesday, the latest update of the Chatbot Arena LLM Leaderboard saw Alibaba Cloud's Qwen2.5-Max, a counterpart to DeepSeek-V3, enter the global top 10 rankings for the first time, outperforming models such as DeepSeek-V3, o1-mini, and Claude-3.5-Sonnet, the Chatbot Arena website showed. 

DeepSeek-R1 and ChatGPT-4o remain tied for third place in overall performance rankings, according to Chatbot Arena website. 

Additionally, Qwen2.5-Max ranked first in mathematics and programming and secured second place in Hard Prompts, the Chatbot Arena website showed.

"Alibaba's Qwen-Max is strong across domains. Especially in technical ones (Coding, Math, Hard Prompts)," Chatbot Arena said in a post on X.

"DeepSeek and Qwen2.5-Max: China's bold move to lead the AI race," wrote Vilmate, a technology-focused blog. It called Qwen2.5-Max a powerful AI model that outperforms DeepSeek V3 and GPT-4o.

Faced with the emergence of Chinese large models, tech enthusiasts have openly praised Qwen2.5-Max on social media.

"I used Qwen-Max, and it's a very good model. I believe in Chinese technologies and hope to continue on the path of sharing and open source," one X user wrote under the official account of Qwen.

"Qwen stands as one of China's earliest open-source models and has long been recognized as a leading domestic model. However, it gained significant global attention following its release of a new version during the Spring Festival holidays shortly after DeepSeek's emergence as a global contender, Li Baiyang, an associate professor of intelligence studies with Nanjing University, told the Global Times.

"China has firmly established itself as a force that can no longer be overlooked and should be recognized and assessed with objectivity and fairness," Shen Yang, a professor studying AI and media at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

However, Australia has banned all services from Chinese tech company DeepSeek on government systems and devices, following similar moves by US agencies including NASA and the Pentagon. These moves have been criticized by industry observers as some Western countries' inability to assess China's technological rise fairly and objectively.

"I believe from DeepSeek to the recognition of Qwen2.5-Max by users and tech communities, the contribution of Chinese developers to the open-source ecosystem, a noble ideal and practice for programmers, is significantly increasing," Shen said. 

A number of US tech giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon have already rushed to adopt the latest AI reasoning model from DeepSeek, media reported. 

Through open source, the Chinese AI models provide developers around the world with an open platform for innovation and applications, speeding up global AI adoption, ultimately benefiting the entire tech ecosystem, Shen said. "AI technology should not be monopolized by a few, as monopolization could result in AI supremacy and control by a select few."