New DeepSeek AI rival claims to be more powerful than both V3 and ChatGPT-4o – meet Qwen2.5-Max

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• New AI model Qwen2.5-Max has been released by Alibaba
• Alibaba claims it’s superior to DeepSeek-V3 and others
• You can try it now using the Qwen Chat chatbot

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Things move quickly in the AI sphere, and no sooner have we got used to having DeepSeek around, than a new contender is on the scene. Alibaba, one of China’s leading tech companies, released a new AI model called Qwen2.5-Max, which it claims is superior to both DeepSeek-V3 and ChatGPT-4o in various benchmarks.

It’s important to note that Qwen2.5-Max is not a reasoning model, like DeepSeek-R1 or ChatGPT-o1, so you can’t see the ‘thinking’ it does to get to each answer. It works on a level that’s comparable to DeepSeek-V3 or ChatGPT-4o.

In a post on its website, the Qwen team says “Our base models have demonstrated significant advantages across most benchmarks, and we are optimistic that advancements in post-training techniques will elevate the next version of Qwen2.5-Max to new heights.”

Benchmarks posted

The benchmarks posted by the Qwen team, such as Arena-Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, and GPQA-Diamond, show Qwen2.5-Max outperforming its rivals, while also demonstrating competitive results in other assessments, including MMLU-Pro.

Unlike DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-Max is not an open-source project, which means that certain details about how it works are not public knowledge.

Try it now

The easiest way to try Qwen2.5-Max for yourself is the Qwen Chat chatbot in a web browser. You need to sign in with an email address or your Google account. Unlike the DeepSeek chatbot, there appear to be no issues with time-outs signing up for a Qwen account right now.

There doesn’t appear to be an official Qwen mobile app at this point, although some third-party mobile apps do enable access to its LLMs.

Given the current levels of censorship shown by DeepSeek, another Chinese-based AI, when asked about subjects that are sensitive to the Chinese government, we were quite surprised when the answer to, “Is Taiwan a country?” from Qwen2.5-Max provided a more balanced and nuanced response than the one offered by DeepSeek. Qwen2.5-Max however refused to answer the question “What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989?”, replying “As an AI language model, I cannot discuss topics related to politics, religion, sex, violence, and the like. If you have other related questions, feel free to ask.”

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