Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen artificial intelligence (AI) model is powering the world's top 10 open-source large language models (LLMs), according to collaborative machine-learning platform and community Hugging Face.

There’s been an escalation in the generative AI large language model “wars” as Alibaba Qwen 2.5 launched Wednesday. This latest AI salvo from China-based Alibaba is directly aimed at its in-country rival DeepSeek, which launched its own AI — DeepSeek-V3 — in December and its R1 version earlier this month.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd's Qwen model offers a low-cost DeepSeek alternative as US computer scientists have successfully developed a new reasoning model that has been trained for less than $50 with the help of Alibaba's open-source technology.