Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen artificial intelligence (AI) model is powering the world's top 10 open-source large language models (LLMs), according to collaborative machine-learning platform and community Hugging Face.

Stanford’s S1 and Berkeley’s TinyZero are two examples of how researchers are increasingly using Alibaba tech to lower AI training costs.

There’s been an escalation in the generative AI large language model “wars” as Alibaba Qwen 2.5 launched Wednesday. This latest AI salvo from China-based Alibaba is directly aimed at its in-country rival DeepSeek, which launched its own AI — DeepSeek-V3 — in December and its R1 version earlier this month.