Alibaba rises as Citron touts Alibaba's new Qwen AI models
Jan. 29, 2025 8:26 AM ET
By: Chris Ciaccia, SA News Editor
 Robert Way
Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) shares rose 3.5% in premarket trading on Wednesday as investment firm Citron Research continued to hype up the company's new Qwen AI models, launched earlier this week.
"Citron has been ahead of the curve on Alibaba and Qwen for the past six months," the investment firm wrote in a post on X. "But what’s even more critical (and still overlooked) is Qwen’s enterprise applications. China lags the U.S. by decades in business software, and the catch-up will be rapid. This is bullish for China overall and strengthens the long China trade."
Alibaba Cloud’s own Qwen team recently released a new family of artificial intelligence models, Qwen2.5-VL, capable of performing a number of text and image analysis tasks. The new Qwen2.5-VL range can parse files, analyze videos, count objects in images and control computers – capabilities similar to OpenAI’s new Operator model.
Alibaba published benchmark scores that showed the new Qwen 2.5 Max version of the large language model scored better than Meta Platforms' ( META) Llama and DeepSeek's V3 model.
 Qwen 2.5 performance benchmarks - GitHub (https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2.5-max/)
Qwen also said the new models topped the performance of OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Amazon-backed ( AMZN) Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Google’s ( GOOG) ( GOOGL) Gemini 2.0 Flash in math, document analysis, video analysis and question-answering evaluations.
Qwen is a series of large language models independently developed by Alibaba Cloud.
DeepSeek sent shockwaves into the tech sector and financial markets earlier this week when it released its DeepSeek R1 model. It also unveiled a research paper that appeared to indicate it built its model with only $5.6M in training costs, substantially lower than models built by U.S. companies, including OpenAI.
However, a number of people in the tech community, including Elon Musk, have questioned whether DeepSeek has more Nvidia ( NVDA) GPUs than it was able to publicly disclose in its research paper.
(Seeking Alpha's Preeti Singh contributed to this story.) |
