The Alibaba office building is seen in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, on Aug 28, 2024.
CFOTO | Future Publishing | Getty Images
Alibaba shares surged on Wednesday after the Chinese behemoth revealed a new reasoning model it claims can rival DeepSeek’s global blockbuster R1.
Hong Kong-listed shares of Alibaba ended the Thursday session up 8.39% — hitting a new 52-week high — with the company’s New York-trading stock rising around 2.5% in premarket deals. Alibaba shares have gained nearly 71% in Hong Kong in the year to date.
The Chinese giant on Thursday unveiled QwQ-32B, its latest AI reasoning model, which it said “rivals cutting-edge reasoning model, e.g., DeepSeek-R1.”
Alibaba’s QwQ-32B operates with 32 billion parameters compared to DeepSeek’s 671 billion parameters with 37 billion parameters actively engaged during inference — the process of running live data through a trained AI model in order to generate a prediction or tackle a task.
Parameters are variables that large language models (LLMs) — AI systems that can understand and generate human language — pick up during training and use in prediction and decision-making. A lower volume of parameters typically signals higher efficiency amid increasing demand for optimized AI that consumes fewer resources.
Alibaba said its new model achieved “impressive results” and the company can “continuously improve the performance especially in math and coding.”
Both established and emerging AI players around the world are racing to produce more efficient and higher-performance models since the unexpected launch of DeepSeek’s revolutionary R1 earlier this year.
Chinese firms have been doubling down on the technology with Alibaba investing in AI after debuting its first model in 2023. The strength of the company’s cloud Intelligence unit was a key contributor to Alibaba’s sharp profit hike in the December quarter.
“Looking ahead, revenue growth at Cloud Intelligence Group driven by AI will continue to accelerate,” Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said at the time.
Optimism surrounding AI developments could lead to large gains for Alibaba stock and set the company’s earnings “on a more upwardly-pointing trajectory,” Bernstein analysts said.
“The pace of innovation is incredibly fast right now. It’s really good for the world to see this happening,” Futurum Group CEO Dan Newman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday. “When DeepSeek came out, it made everyone sort of question, was OpenAi the final answer? Would the incumbents, the Microsofts, the Googles, or the Amazons that have all made massive investments win?”
He stressed that the large language models were increasingly “becoming commoditized” as developers look to drive down costs and improve access to users.
“As we see this more efficiency, this cost coming down, we’re also going to see use going off. The training era, which is what Nvidia really built its initial AI boom off, was a big moment,” Newman said. “But the inference, the consumption of AI, is really the future and this is going to exponentially increase that volume.”
