Alibaba has just unveiled its latest reasoning model, and it seems that DeepSeek and OpenAI might have something to worry about — at least if all of Alibaba’s promises turn out to be true. It’s open-source, so I checked it out. You can try it out for free, too, although unsurprisingly, you’ll find that there are some things it won’t talk to you about.
The new model, dubbed QwQ-32b (Quan-with-Questions) runs on much fewer parameters, meaning that it requires less resources, but Alibaba claims that it performs at the same level as DeepSeek or OpenAI’s o1-mini.
DeepSeek’s R1 large language model (LLM) was all the rage earlier in February when it came out, suddenly capable of rivaling the golden standard set by ChatGPT and other alternatives, but at a much lower cost. It seems that Alibaba might be pushing the envelope even further here.
As explained by VentureBeat, DeepSeek-R1 requires 671 billion parameters to run, 37 billion of which are activated. Meanwhile, Alibaba’s new QwQ-32b can get by with 32 billion parameters. Those numbers are totally abstract to many, but there’s a huge difference in compute power; while DeepSeek R1 requires 1600GB of VRAM to run, QwQ-32b can get by with just 24GB of VRAM. In most cases, this will mean Nvidia’s H100 or equivalents, but even the gaming-focused RTX 4090 sports 24GB. The latest RTX 5090 ups that to 32GB.
Alibaba’s QwQ-32b is available under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning that companies and researchers can use it. More importantly, we can use it by trying out Alibaba’s Qwen Chat. Like DeepSeek, it comes with some limitations, but also has a couple of immediate perks that I noticed quite quickly.
It seems to give quite in-depth answers even to quick, simple questions. This can be good, but in a way, it was mostly annoying as it gives you a lot of unnecessary context that you didn’t ask for. I like that it shows you its whole reasoning process, though, which is similar to ChatGPT’s Deep Thinking feature — but with much less depth.
When asked about political matters, Qwen Chat flags it as inappropriate. There might be ways to jailbreak it — it was possible with DeepSeek, after all — but I haven’t managed to just yet.
Whether Alibaba’s claims turn out to be true remains to be seen, but it looks like ChatGPT and DeepSeek now have a new rival.
articiOver the past few years, AI has gone from limited chatbots to suddenly dominating the news cycle every single day. There are a range of AI chatb
What’s happened? Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather of AI,” told the Ai4 conference that making AI “submissive” is a losing strategy and propose
Apple’s AI efforts haven’t made the same kind of impact as Google’s Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company’s AI stack, dubbed App
One of the most obvious — and honestly, the dullest —trends within the smartphone industry over the past couple of years has been the incessant talk a
Barely a few weeks ago, Google introduced a new AI Search mode. The idea is to provide answers as a wall of text, just the way an AI chatbot answers y
OpenAI is inconsistent in a lot of things — is it a non-profit or a for-profit? Is Sam Altman fit to be CEO or not? But one thing the company has alwa
Machine learning platform, Hugging Face, has released an iOS app that will make sense of the world around you as seen by your iPhone’s camera. Just po
Sam Altman did a panel discussion at Technische Universität Berlin last week, where he predicted that ChatGPT-5 would be smarter than him — or more ac
We are a comprehensive and trusted information platform dedicated to delivering high-quality content across a wide range of topics, including society, technology, business, health, culture, and entertainment.
From breaking news to in-depth reports, we adhere to the principles of accuracy and diverse perspectives, helping readers find clarity and reliability in today’s fast-paced information landscape.
Our goal is to be a dependable source of knowledge for every reader—making information not only accessible but truly trustworthy. Looking ahead, we will continue to enhance our content and services, connecting the world and delivering value.
