Chinese tech giant Alibaba unveiled its latest artificial intelligence reasoning model on Thursday, boasting that its capabilities beat those of rival models from OpenAI and startup DeepSeek.

Alibaba Cloud on Thursday launched QwQ-32B, a compact reasoning model built on its latest large language model (LLM), Qwen2.5-32b, one it says delivers performance comparable to other large cutting edge models, including Chinese rival DeepSeek and OpenAI’s o1, with only 32 billion parameters.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba said its latest AI reasoning model, QwQ-32B, "rivals cutting-edge reasoning model, e.g., DeepSeek-R1."

Hong-Kong listed shares (HK:9988) jumped over 8% today, after the company launched its new open-source AI (artificial intelligence) model, which challenges DeepSeek’s R1 model. Alibaba’s AI unit, Qwen,

The news prompted Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares to close 8% higher on the day and helped boost the Hang Seng’s China Enterprises Index. The release of Alibaba’s new AI model comes a day after the launch of the “general AI agent” Manus by another Chinese company,