Ahead of DeepSeek's R2 release, Alibaba announced its new Qwen3 AI model, as the Chinese companies fight for the best AI LLMs.

Yet another player is claiming the top spot for AI. Alibaba, one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, has announced the launch of its latest AI reasoning model, known as Qwen 3. Alibaba claims these models match (and even outperform) models from both Google and OpenAI in reasoning tasks.

It has made Qwen3 models freely available for download on Hugging Face, GitHub and Modelscope, as well as being available on its own site chat.qwen.ai. Alibaba plans to make API access available soon through its AI model development platform Model Studio. Qwen3 also powers Alibaba’s “AI super assistant” application, Quark.