Alibaba unveils Qwen3 AI models that it says outperform DeepSeek R1
Alibaba Group Holding on Tuesday unveiled the highly anticipated third generation of its open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model series, which promises faster processing and enhanced multilingual capabilities, intensifying competition in an already crowded Chinese market.
The Qwen3 family consists of eight models, ranging from 600 million parameters to 235 billion, with enhancements across all models, according to the Qwen team at Alibaba's cloud computing unit. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
In AI, parameters are a measurement of the variables present during model training. They serve as an indicator of sophistication: larger parameter sizes typically suggest greater capacity.
Benchmark tests cited by Alibaba revealed that models such as Qwen3-235B and Qwen3-4B matched or exceeded the performance of advanced models from both domestic and overseas competitors – including OpenAI's o1, Google's Gemini and DeepSeek's R1 – in areas like instruction following, coding assistance, text generation, mathematical skills and complex problem solving.
The launch of Qwen3, which was anticipated this month as previously reported by the Post, is expected to solidify Alibaba's position as a leading provider of open-source models. With over 100,000 derivative models built upon it, Qwen is currently the world's largest open-source AI ecosystem, surpassing Facebook parent Meta Platforms' Llama community.
'Qwen3 represents a significant milestone in our journey towards artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence,' the Qwen team said, adding that the new models achieved a higher level of intelligence through enhanced pre-training and reinforcement learning.
Trained on 36 trillion tokens covering 119 languages and dialects – tripling the language coverage of Qwen2.5 – Qwen3 shows improved capabilities in understanding and translating instructions across multiple languages, according to the team.
The Qwen3 model family is available on Microsoft's GitHub, the open-source AI community Hugging Face and Alibaba's own AI model hosting service, ModelScope. It has also been integrated into the web-based Qwen chatbot as the default model for user queries.
All Qwen3 models feature hybrid reasoning functionality, allowing users to toggle between a 'thinking' mode, which is suitable for complex problems and takes longer to respond, and a 'non-thinking' mode, which offers quicker responses for everyday tasks.
Alibaba's release of its latest AI model comes just days after Baidu introduced two advanced models amid speculation about the imminent release of DeepSeek's R2. The development underscores the intensifying competition in China's foundational AI model market, as Big Tech firms race to develop and upgrade their offerings.
The Hangzhou-based e-commerce giant has been doubling down on its AI investments, focusing on funding and talent acquisition to maintain its competitive edge and enhance its business operations.
Earlier this year, Alibaba pledged more than US$52bil over the next three years to build AI infrastructure, marking the largest computing project by a private company in China. Additionally, the group launched a spring hiring campaign, with half of the internship positions dedicated to AI-focused roles. – South China Morning Post
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