Alibaba’s New Model Adds Fuel to China’s AI Race

On March 5, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released its latest AI reasoning model, QwQ-32B, resulting in an 8% spike in the company’s Hong Kong-listed shares. While less capable than America’s leading AI systems, such as OpenAI’s o3 or Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the model reportedly performs about as well as its Chinese competitor DeepSeek’s model, R1, while requiring considerably less computing power to develop and to run. Its creators say QwQ-32B embodies an “ancient…