Alibaba’s Qwen Team announced Qwen2.5-Max on January 28, 2025, claiming it outperformed DeepSeek V3 on several selected benchmarks. The results were the team’s own evaluation—not independent proof that Qwen2.5-Max is better for every task. The announcement did not compare it with DeepSeek-R1.
What did Alibaba claim about Qwen2.5-Max?
In its January 28, 2025 announcement, the Qwen Team said Qwen2.5-Max outperformed DeepSeek V3 on Arena-Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, and GPQA-Diamond, while delivering competitive results on MMLU-Pro. The team also published comparisons with GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet for instruct models.
Those are benchmark claims from Qwen’s developer. The announcement does not independently establish that the tests were reproduced by an outside evaluator or that Qwen2.5-Max is the best choice across all tasks. A benchmark result is most useful when the model variant, task, evaluation date, and testing conditions are clear.
Which DeepSeek model was in the comparison?
The comparison was with DeepSeek V3, not DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek’s January 20, 2025 release announcement describes R1 as a reasoning model; it is a separate model from V3. So the headline’s broad reference to “DeepSeek” should be read specifically as V3 for the Qwen Team’s benchmark claim.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsWhat did Alibaba say about the model’s training?
The Qwen Team described Qwen2.5-Max as a large-scale mixture-of-experts (MoE) model pretrained on more than 20 trillion tokens. It said the model was then post-trained using curated supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). These are the team’s descriptions of its training process, not independently verified measurements.
What did Alibaba later report about Chatbot Arena?
In a February 5, 2025 follow-up, Alibaba reported that Qwen2.5-Max ranked seventh overall on Chatbot Arena, first in math and coding, and second on hard prompts. These are Alibaba’s reported positions on that date. They are historical results, not current October 2026 rankings.
How could developers and users access it at launch?
The January announcement said users could try Qwen2.5-Max in Qwen Chat and developers could access it through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio APIs. It gave the API model name qwen-max-2025-01-25 and showed an OpenAI-compatible API usage pattern. Those details document the launch announcement only; the sources cited here do not establish current service availability, pricing, supported regions, or account requirements.
How should you interpret the comparison?
Qwen2.5-Max’s reported edge was limited to particular tests and a particular comparison. To assess any model matchup, check whether the result concerns a base or instruct model, which benchmark and date were used, what task it measures, and whether the evaluation is vendor-reported or an independent ranking. Hosted access and deployment conditions can also affect which model is practical for a given use.
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The January announcement said proprietary GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet were unavailable for comparison in its base-model results; it named DeepSeek V3, Llama-3.1-405B, and Qwen2.5-72B instead. That distinction matters: base-model and instruct-model comparisons are not interchangeable, and the listed results do not amount to one universal ranking.
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