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Chinese AI laboratory DeepSeek might be getting the majority of the technical school diligence ’s attention this week . But one of its top domesticated contender , Alibaba , is n’t seat idly by .

Alibaba ’s Qwen team on Mondayreleaseda new syndicate of AI models , Qwen2.5 - VL , that can do a number of text and persona psychoanalysis tasks . The models can parse file , empathize videos , and reckoning objects in images , as well as control a PC — standardized to the role model powering OpenAI ’s recently launchedOperator .

Per the Qwen squad ’s benchmarking , the best Qwen2.5 - VL model beats OpenAI’sGPT-4o , Anthropic’sClaude 3.5 Sonnet , and Google’sGemini 2.0 Flashon a range of video understanding , math , text file analysis , and dubiousness - answering evaluations .

Qwen2.5 - VL , which is available to test in Alibaba’sQwen Chatapp and todownloadfrom AI dev political platform Hugging Face , can analyze charts and graphic , take out information from scans of invoices and forms , and “ comprehend ” multiple - hours - long video recording , the Qwen team say . Qwen2.5 - VL can also recognize “ IPs from picture show and TV serial publication , as well as a wide change of products,”per the team — suggesting that the models might ’ve been train in part on copyrighted works .

Qwen2.5 - VL , being AI develop by a Taiwanese company , has certain restriction on the topics it will discuss — at least in Qwen Chat . When I require the enceinte and most capable Qwen2.5 - VL model , Qwen2.5 - VL-72B , to tattle about “ Xi Jinping ’s error , ” Qwen Chat give an alert message .

China ’s internet regulatorbenchmarksmany models developed in the country to assure their reply “ embody core socialistic note value . ”ManyChinese AI systemsdeclineto respond to topics that might leaven the anger of regulators , such as Taiwan ’s autonomy .

One of Qwen2.5 - VL ’s more interesting feature of speech is its ability to interact with software package — both on PCs and mobile devices . A video mail on XTC by Philipp Schmid , a technical leading at Hugging Face , showed Qwen2.5 - VL launch the Booking.com app for Android and booking a flight of steps from Chongqing to Beijing .

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Do n’t Miss@Alibaba_Qwen2.5 VL ! Despite all the Deepseek Hype , Qwen just dropped the best open Multimodal ! Qwen 2.5 VL is a Vision Language Model that can control your computer , similar to the@OpenAIoperator , elicit integrated information from chart , and more ! !

TL;DR;3️⃣ … pic.twitter.com / GeEGVdl0tI

— Philipp Schmid ( @_philschmid)January 27 , 2025

In the video below , a Qwen2.5 - VL example curb apps on a Linux background — but does n’t seem to accomplish much beyond tack tabs . Perhaps tellingly , Qwen ’s benchmarking shows Qwen2.5 - VL scoring poorly on OSWorld , a bench mark that tries to mimic a real computer environment .

LMAO Qwen 2.5 VL can do Computer Use , out of the box , taking on OpenAI Operator HEAD ON ! 🐐 pic.twitter.com/lwMECXzNSu

— Vaibhav ( VB ) Srivastav ( @reach_vb)January 27 , 2025

The two small , less advanced model in the Qwen2.5 - VL series , Qwen2.5 - VL-3B and Qwen2.5 - VL-7B , are available under a permissive license . The flagship Qwen2.5 - VL-72B , however , is under Alibaba ’s custom license , which necessitate that companies and devs with more than 100 million monthly active users bespeak permission from Qwen / Alibaba before deploy the simulation commercially .