Qwen 2.5

Qwen 2.5 is a new release in Alibaba’s large language model (LLM) family, developed by Alibaba Cloud for AI and cloud computing use cases.

The Qwen 2.5-Max announcement drew attention partly because it was timed for the first day of Chinese New Year, amid intensified competition in China and globally following DeepSeek’s rapid progress and the release of DeepSeek-V3.

What Qwen can do

• Generate text for different domains and write code in multiple programming languages
• Analyze information, including large volumes of text
• Create images and generate video from prompts or scenarios
• Work offline today, with web search for up-to-date data planned

Benchmarks and model positioning

Alibaba Cloud reports Qwen 2.5-Max performance comparable to or exceeding:

• GPT-4 (OpenAI)
• DeepSeek-V3 and the newer R1 for reasoning tasks
• Llama-3.1-405B (Meta)

The release also emphasizes improvements in code generation/debugging, complex logic and math, and step-by-step chain-of-thought reasoning. Alibaba and the community are also exploring multimodal variants, including prototypes like QVQ (Qwen Vision+Query) aimed at combining visual analysis with reasoning.

How Alibaba positions Qwen Chat

Qwen Chat is presented as a general-purpose tool for Alibaba Cloud customers and partners, from e-commerce support automation to internal enterprise services, with an emphasis on open weights and developer collaboration.