Alibaba shares soar after Chinese tech giant unveils new DeepSeek rival

The Alibaba office building is seen in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, on Aug 28, 2024. Alibaba shares surged on Wednesday after the Chinese behemoth revealed a new reasoning model it claims can rival DeepSeek's global blockbuster R1. Hong Kong-listed shares of Alibaba ended the Thursday session up 8.39% — hitting a new 52-week high — with the company's New York-trading stock rising around 2.5% in premarket deals. Alibaba shares have gained nearly 71% in Hong Kong in the year to date. The Chinese giant on Thursday unveiled QwQ-32B, its latest AI reasoning model, which it said "rivals cutting-edge reasoning model, e.g., DeepSeek-R1." Alibaba's QwQ-32B operates with 32 billion parameters compared to DeepSeek's 671 billion parameters with 37 billion parameters actively engaged during inference — the process of running live data through a trained AI model in order to generate a prediction or tackle a task. Parameters are variables that large language models (LLMs) — AI systems that ... Read full article.