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.

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.

Analysts say China’s AI investment is just beginning to pay off, with more firms expected to launch their own models soon.