Qwen 2.5 is a series of advanced large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud, featuring significant enhancements over its predecessor, Qwen 2. The latest iteration, Qwen 2.5-Max, was recently released and is designed to compete with leading models in the AI landscape.

One of the most interesting highlights of this new model are improvements in instruction following, long-text generation (up to 8K tokens), and understanding structured data such as tables. It also supports generating structured outputs in formats like JSON.

The company behind Qwen released a report detailing how their model Qwen2.5-Max beated the new Deepseek AI in various benchmarks showing the possibility that the AI war for creating the best model has reached another peak.

The report is very technical but shows that in various benchmarks from this industry, their model is capable of beating of achieving incredible performance leaving behind other strong competitors like DeepSeek-V3 and OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

The model is also available via an API, allowing developers to integrate its functionalities into their applications easily. The API is designed to be compatible with OpenAI’s API standards, facilitating straightforward usage. 


In a fast-paced AI racing this can be another significant milestone, just after DeepSeek’s disruption of the industry with his new model that cost a fraction of OpenAI’s.

This is not the first model launched by the Alibaba Cloud. The company is working on LLMs for some time and had some amazing results before.

Qwen 2.5-Max is significantly more expensive than both OpenAI and DeepSeek, costing approximately 3-4 times more than GPT-4o for input and output tokens .

While Qwen 2.5-Max claims superior performance in various benchmarks, the higher pricing may impact its adoption compared to the more cost-effective options provided by OpenAI and DeepSeek .

This pricing strategy reflects Alibaba’s approach to positioning Qwen 2.5-Max as a high-performance model, but it may also limit its attractiveness to budget-conscious users compared to its competitors.

Conclusion

The Qwen 2.5 series, particularly the Max variant, represents Alibaba’s commitment to advancing AI technologies and competing with established models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Its robust performance across multiple benchmarks highlights its potential for diverse applications in natural language processing and beyond.