Forget DeepSeek R1, apparently it's now Alibaba that has the most powerful, the cheapest, the most everything-est chatbot

As Ferris astutely observed, life moves pretty fast in chatbot land. So, forget that ancient news about DeepSeek's cheap and powerful LLM tanking Nvidia's share price. Because here comes another Chinese tech giant, Alibaba, with its own new AI model that surpasses the lot. Well, it does according to Alibaba.

Qwen 2.5-Max, for it is he (she? they? take your pick), was released today according to Reuters and with it some pretty bombastic claims.

For now, it's unclear how resource intensive the Qwen 2.5-Max is or is not. The thing that really rattled the markets when it comes to DeepSeek R1 arguably isn't its outright performance, but rather claims that it was trained on just $6 million dollars' worth of slightly hobbled Nvidia H800 GPUs, a small fraction of the cost associated with the huge GPU arrays used by the likes of OpenAI and Meta to train their models.

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The style and tone of the text, the delivery, the length of responses, the actual content, the tendency to hallucinate falsehoods, the sense of very comparable invisible guard rails and, for want of a better term, social adjustment—everything seems virtually identical, for better and indeed also for worse.

Where this all leads is anyone's guess. Maybe we'll be stuck with a load of samey, semi-useful, oft-hallucinating bots for the foreseeable. Or maybe the AGI or artificial general intelligence explosion is just around the corner. Either way, I for one...no, actually, I don't welcome them. But I am fascinated in what happens next.

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Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.