Analysts: Alibaba's Qwen3 AI model family helps narrow tech gap between China and US
Hangzhou-based Alibaba's cloud computing unit on Tuesday unveiled its much-anticipated Qwen3 family, consisting of eight enhanced models that range from 600 million to 235 billion parameters. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
In machine learning, parameters are the variables present in an AI system during training, which helps establish how data prompts yield the desired output.
Alibaba's latest AI models showed that Chinese companies have significantly closed the gap with US firms, while the pace of innovation is expected to continue in spite of US export restrictions on advanced semiconductors, according to Su Lian Jye, chief analyst at research firm Omdia.
Omdia's Su pointed out that the impact of such sanctions on China's AI development efforts have diminished, compared to previous years. There has been growing availability of alternative AI chips from domestic suppliers such as Huawei Technologies and Cambricon Technologies.
Alibaba's latest AI model release reflects Qwen's current position as the world's largest open-source AI ecosystem, surpassing Facebook parent Meta Platforms' Llama community.
Open source gives public access to a program's source code, allowing third-party software developers to modify or share its design, fix broken links or scale up its capabilities. Open-source technologies have been a huge contributor to China's tech industry over the past few decades.
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.
Qwen3 has quickly become the most popular AI model family on platforms like Hugging Face, as the family's models combine reasoning ability, quick answers and cost-efficient adoption.
'Qwen family is the world's best, the most comprehensive, and the most widely used open-source model,' said Zhou Jingren, chief technology officer for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and a key figure behind Qwen, in a report by Chinese media outlet LatePost. 'The whole market is pretty much in agreement about this.'
Alibaba said Qwen3-235B, the largest variant of its new AI model family, surpassed OpenAI's o3-mini and o1, as well as DeepSeek's R1 in areas such as language understanding, domain knowledge, and maths and coding skills.
Lennart Heim, an analyst at US think tank Rand's technology and security policy centre, expected China to match the US in terms of AI model capabilities, which would raise concerns about America losing some of its technological edge, he wrote in a piece published in the Substack newsletter ChinaTalk.
Still, the US maintains ownership of 'more advanced AI chips' on account of tightened export controls, according to Heim.
Meanwhile, AI chip suppliers from Nvidia to Advanced Micro Devices have made support adjustments for Qwen3. Shanghai-based AI chip start-up Biren Technology on Wednesday said its products started to support Qwen3 models 'within hours' after Alibaba's launch.
The current state of China's AI model development marks a big difference from the time OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world on November 30, 2022, according to the State of AI: China Report , published by independent analytics firm Artificial Analysis.
After DeepSeek reset the narrative with the consecutive releases of its V3 and R1 models in late December and January, several Chinese enterprises – from Big Tech companies Baidu, ByteDance and Tencent Holdings to start-ups Moonshot and MiniMax – have achieved so-called frontier-level model capabilities, according to the report.
Other than China and the US, no other countries have showed similar frontier-class model training, the report said.
Meanwhile, Chinese engineers are making notable progress in optimising data and algorithmic techniques to develop AI models that are, arguably, on par with those produced by top US engineers, according to Ray Wang, a Washington-based analyst focused on US-China tech competition as well as the AI and semiconductor industries in Asia. – South China Morning Post
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