Alibaba Unleashes Its Most Powerful AI Yet

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE:BABA) is accelerating its artificial intelligence push across research, infrastructure, and open-source collaboration, underscoring a broad strategy that spans enterprise use cases, developer ecosystems, and emerging applications. Alibaba Cloud Rolls Out Qwen3-Max-Thinking Alibaba Cloud opened the year by unveiling Qwen3-Max-Thinking, its largest and most advanced AI model to date. The release enhances agentic behavior and tool-use capabilities and marks the most powerful entry in Alibaba's Qwen family so far, SCMP reported Tuesday. According to the report, Qwen3-Max-Thinking is designed to improve real-world user experience without sharply increasing computing costs. Internal testing showed performance comparable to leading U.S. models, including Anthropic's Claude-Opus-4.5 and Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google DeepMind Gemini 3 Pro, across 19 benchmarks. Moonshot AI Expands Open-Source Capabilities Alongside Alibaba's in-house advances, Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI released Kimi K2.5, which it described as the most powerful open-source model to date. The new version adds multimodal capabilities for video and image generation, while positioning Kimi as a lower-cost alternative to top U.S. coding models, the report noted. Alibaba's ambitions have also extended beyond Earth. After Qwen-3 became the first general-purpose AI to perform inference in orbit, Chinese aerospace startup Adaspace Technology deployed the model to an orbital computing center. Adaspace executive vice president Wang Yabo said the system completed the full cycle—from uploading queries on Earth to running inference in orbit and sending results back to the ground—in under two minutes. Open Source Gains Real-World Traction Alibaba's open-source strategy is driving downstream adoption. Chinese startup DeepSeek upgraded its optical character recognition system by replacing a key component with Alibaba Cloud's lightweight Qwen2-0.5b model, improving document scanning and interpretation, SCMP reported. DeepSeek has since open-sourced the upgraded OCR model. Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma has emphasized AI's broader societal impact. Speaking at an online event hosted by a rural education charity, Ma said the real challenge of AI is how they teach the next generation to use it responsibly, TechNode reported Wednesday. BABA Price Action: Alibaba shares were up 2.62% at $177.25 during premarket trading on Wednesday, according to Benzinga Pro data. Photo via Shutterstock