Alibaba Cloud’s newest AI model, Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B, has debuted with a splash. The Chinese company is touting it as “the first natively end-to-end omni-modal AI unifying text, image, audio & video in one model.” While Qwen3-Omni can accept prompts of text, image, audio and video, it only outputs text and audio. Alibaba Cloud has released the three versions of Qwen3-Omni so users can select based on their needs, choosing between general multimodal capabilities, deep reasoning or specialized audio understanding. Alibaba has also developed an AI chip called T-Head that performs comparably to Nvidia’s H20. Continue reading Alibaba’s Qwen3-Omni AI Ingests Text, Images, Audio, Video

Alibaba’s Qwen team has launched Qwen3-Coder, which it calls its “most agentic code model to date.” While it will be made available in multiple sizes, the most powerful variant — Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-Instruct — is being released first. The 480 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model has 35 billion active parameters supporting a context length of 256,000 tokens natively and 1 million tokens with extrapolation methods for “exceptional performance in both coding and agentic tasks,” explains the group, which claims the quasi-open source model has agentic coding, agentic browser use, and agentic tool use comparable to Anthropic’s proprietary Claude Sonnet 4. Continue reading Alibaba Is Rolling Out Its ‘Most Agentic Code Model to Date’

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has released a new multimodal model called Qwen VLo that can understand and generate images. Available for free in preview through Qwen Chat, it can use image or text prompts to generate pictures, and accepts text in multiple languages, including Chinese and English. It can also edit, change backgrounds and switch styles, handling multiple image edits in sequence. An upgrade over January’s Qwen 2.5-VL release, Qwen VLo uses progressive generation, allowing users to see the image creation in progress, and Alibaba says it’s particularly good at making inline adjustments to fine-tune images. Continue reading Alibaba’s Qwen VLo Generative AI Shows Images in Progress

DeepSeek-R1-0528 is here, and this latest iteration is generating almost as much stir as the initial open-source R1 reasoning model did in January. The Chinese startup, owned by quantitative analysis firm High-Flyer Capital, is touted by one media outlet as “near parity in reasoning capabilities with proprietary paid models such as OpenAI’s o3 and Google Gemini 2.5 Pro.” Promised are stronger capabilities in complex reasoning centered on math, science, business and coding, along with improved features for developers and researchers. As with the earlier release, the DeepSeek-R1-0528 is available under the MIT License, which supports commercial use and allows customization. Continue reading DeepSeek’s New Update Heightens Rivalry with U.S. AI Firms

China’s Alibaba Group has released a Qwen3 LLM series said to be at the leading edge of open-source models, nearly achieving the performance of proprietary models from AI competitors OpenAI and Google. Alibaba says Qwen3 offers improvements in reasoning, tool use, instruction following and multilingual abilities. The Qwen3 series features eight new models — two that are mixture-of-experts and six built on dense neural networks. Their sizes range from 600 million to 235 billion parameters. The size and scope of the Alibaba slate maintains China’s accelerated AI pace in the wake of DeepSeek’s game-changing debut. Continue reading Alibaba Touts Advance in Open-Source AI with Qwen3 Series

OpenAI has launched a new series of multimodal models dubbed GPT-4.1 that represent what the company says is a leap in small model performance, including longer context windows and improvements in coding and instruction following. Geared to developers and available exclusively via API (not through ChatGPT), the 4.1 series comes in three variations: in addition to the flagship GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini and GPT‑4.1 nano, OpenAI’s first nano model. Unlike Web-connected models (which have “retrieval-augmented generation,” or RAG) and can access up-to-date information, they are static knowledge models. Continue reading OpenAI’s Affordable GPT-4.1 Models Place Focus on Coding

China’s Ant Group is using local semiconductors to train AI at a cost that is 20 percent less than companies typically spend, according to reports. Ant used domestic chips — from companies including Alibaba, an investor in Ant, and Huawei — to launch a unique Mixture of Experts (MoE) training approach that produced results commensurate to training with Nvidia H800 chips. Ant is the latest Chinese company to focus on low cost training, joining a competition triggered by DeepSeek, which in January announced it could build AI comparable to the models released by U.S. companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google for billions less. Continue reading Ant Group Stacks Chips to Reduce Development Costs for AI

Alibaba Cloud has released Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, a new AI model the company claims is efficient enough to run on edge devices like mobile phones and laptops. Boasting a relatively light 7-billion parameter footprint, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B understands text, images, audio and video and generates real-time responses in text and natural speech. Alibaba says its combination of compact size and multimodal capabilities is “unique,” offering “the perfect foundation for developing agile, cost-effective AI agents that deliver tangible value, especially intelligent voice applications.” One example would be using a phone’s camera to help a vision impaired-person navigate their environment. Continue reading Alibaba’s Powerful Multimodal Qwen Model Is Built for Mobile

Alibaba Group has revamped its Quark search engine as an AI “super assistant” powered by its flagship Qwen reasoning model. Quark had previously relied on a model called QuarkLLM. The new iteration features a chatbot, deep thinking and agentic capability, Alibaba says. The company also debuted R1-Omni, a model it says has emotional intelligence. Included in the flurry of Alibaba news: a strategic partnership with Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, the company behind the new AI agent Manus. The moves are part of a surge of Chinese AI tech coming to market as the country asserts itself in the space. Continue reading Alibaba Updates Quark, Debuts R1-Omni, Secures Manus Pact

Alibaba is making AI news again, releasing another Qwen reasoning model, QwQ-32B, which was trained and scaled using reinforcement learning (RL). The Qwen team says it “has the potential to enhance model performance beyond conventional pretraining and post-training methods.” QwQ-32B, a 32 billion parameter model, “achieves performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1, which boasts 671 billion parameters (with 37 billion activated),” Alibaba claims. While parameters refer to the total set of adjustable weights and biases in the model’s neural network, “activated” parameters are a subset used for a specific inference task, like generating a response. Continue reading Alibaba Says Qwen Reasoning Model on Par with DeepSeek

Alibaba has open-sourced its Wan 2.1 video- and image-generating AI models, heating up an already competitive space. The Wan 2.1 family, which has four models, is said to produce “highly realistic” images and videos from text and images. The company has since December been previewing a new reasoning model, QwQ-Max, indicating it will be open-sourced when fully released. The move comes after another Chinese AI company, DeepSeek, released its R1 reasoning model for free download and use, triggering demand for more open-source artificial intelligence. Continue reading Highly Realistic Alibaba GenVid Models Are Available for Free

Apple unveiled a big “made in the USA” initiative, with plans to spend more than $500 billion on U.S. factories over the next four years. The company will upgrade operations in California, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas, adding a new server facility in Houston. The move comes as U.S. international relations enter a period of flux. Apple’s plans include opening “a manufacturing academy” and accelerated investments in educating stateside workers in AI and silicon engineering. “We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing U.S. investments,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said. Continue reading Apple Will Invest $500B in U.S. Manufacturing and Education

Barely two weeks after the launch of its OmniHuman-1 AI model, ByteDance has released Goku, a new artificial intelligence designed to create photorealistic video featuring humanoid actors. Goku uses text prompts to create among other things, realistic product videos without the need for human actors. This last is a boon for ByteDance social media unit TikTok. Goku is open source, trained on a large dataset of roughly 36 million video-text pairs and 160 million image-text pairs. Goku’s debut is received as more bad news for OpenAI in the form of added competition, but a positive step for global enterprise. Continue reading ByteDance’s Goku Video Model Is Latest in Chinese AI Streak

Model training continues to hit new lows in terms of cost, a phenomenon known as the commoditization of AI that has rocked Wall Street. An AI reasoning model created for under $50 in cloud compute credits is reportedly performing comparably to established reasoning models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 on tests of math and coding aptitude. Called s1-32B, it was created by researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington by customizing Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct, feeding it 1,000 prompts with responses sourced from Google’s new Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental reasoning model. Continue reading Reasoning Model Competes with Advanced AI at a Lower Cost

An internecine AI battle has erupted between Alibaba and DeepSeek. Days after DeepSeek dominated several news cycles with its affordable DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model and the multimodal Janus-Pro-7B, Alibaba released its latest LLM, Qwen 2.5-Max, available via API from Alibaba Cloud. As with DeepSeek, Alibaba is looking beyond its domestic borders, but the fact that a public-facing AI battle is heating up between Chinese companies indicates the People’s Republic isn’t going to quietly cede the AI race to the U.S. Alibaba claims Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms models from DeepSeek, Meta and OpenAI. Continue reading Alibaba Plans to Take On AI Competitors with Qwen2.5-Max