Chinese smaller generative AI tool exhibits robust abilities at much lower cost

BEIJING -- A Chinese open-source AI model is shown to rival top-tier global competitors such as DeepSeek R1, despite its smaller size, representing another step forward in balancing performance and efficiency in AI application.

The QwQ-32B, unveiled last Thursday by Alibaba's Qwen team, operates on just 24 GB of video memory with only 32 billion parameters, while DeepSeek's R1 demands 1,600 GB to run its 671 billion parameters, thus realizing a 98-percent reduction.

Also, compared to OpenAI's o1-mini and Anthropic's Sonnet 3.7, Qwen's AI model has substantially lower computational requirements.

Kyle Corbitt, a former Google engineer, published his testing results on social media platform X, showing that "the smaller, open-weight model can match state-of-the-art reasoning performance."

According to Corbitt's team, QwQ-32B achieved the second-highest score in a deductive reasoning benchmark via a method called reinforcement learning (RL), outperforming R1, o1 and o3-mini, while nearly matching Sonnet 3.7's performance at an inference cost more than 100-fold lower than that required by Sonnet 3.7.

"AI isn't just getting smarter, it's learning how to evolve," commented Shashank Yadav, CEO of Fraction AI. "QwQ-32B proves that reinforcement learning can out-compete brute-force scaling."

"We found RL training enhances performance, particularly in math and coding tasks. Its expansion can enable medium-sized models to match large MoE models' performance," read Qwen's blog article on Github.

Qwen's new model is expected to enhance the feasibility of local operations for generative AI products on computers and even mobile devices in the future.

Awni Hannun, a computer scientist at Apple, has run QwQ-32B on the Apple computer powered by its M4 Max chip, and it appears to be "running nicely."

China's national supercomputing internet platform last Saturday announced the launch of the API interface service for QwQ-32B. In addition, Biren Technology, a Shanghai-based GPU chip designer, announced Sunday that it has launched an all-in-one machine capable of running this model.

QwQ-32B is freely accessible as an open-source model that anyone can run, following DeepSeek's path of facilitating wider application of AI technologies worldwide and contributing China's wisdom to the world.

Alibaba also recently open-sourced its AI video-generating model Wan2.1, which is available for download on Alibaba Cloud's AI model community, Model Scope and the collaborative AI platform Hugging Face.

The e-commerce and cloud-computing giant has announced a plan to invest more than 380 billion yuan (about $52.97 billion) in building cloud and AI hardware infrastructure over the next three years.