At the Apsara Conference 2025 in Hangzhou, hosted by Alibaba Cloud, Chinese AI startups showcased their commitment to developing advanced large language models (LLMs) to compete globally. Their efforts follow OpenAI’s announcement of its latest o1 generative pre-trained transformer model, backed by Microsoft, which is designed to tackle complex tasks in science, coding, and mathematics.
Kunal Zhilin, founder of Moonshot AI, highlighted the significance of OpenAI’s o1 model, suggesting it could transform various industries and open new doors for AI innovation. He emphasized the role of reinforcement learning and scalability in advancing LLMs, referring to the scaling law—the principle that larger models trained with more data tend to perform better.
“This approach pushes the ceiling of AI capabilities,” Zhilin said, noting the o1 model’s potential to reshape sectors and drive startup growth.
According to Zhilin, organizations equipped with sufficient computational power can not only develop algorithms but also build next-generation foundation models. As existing datasets become exhausted, reinforcement learning is increasingly being used to generate synthetic data for training.
Challenges with Compute Power and U.S. Trade Restrictions
However, Jiang Daxin, CEO of StepFun, acknowledged the computational challenges many Chinese startups face, especially due to U.S. trade restrictions that limit access to advanced semiconductors and AI chips.
“The computational requirements are still substantial,” said Daxin, underscoring the hurdles smaller AI firms must overcome.
An insider at Baichuan AI noted that only a select few Chinese AI companies—including Moonshot AI, Zhipu AI, MiniMax, and Baichuan AI itself—are equipped to make substantial investments in reinforcement learning. These companies, known as the “AI tigers”, are driving China’s most ambitious LLM development efforts.
Alibaba Cloud Expands LLM Portfolio with Qwen 2.5
In parallel, Alibaba Cloud unveiled major updates at the conference, announcing the release of the Qwen 2.5 model family. The updated models, ranging from 0.5 billion to 72 billion parameters, offer improved performance in coding and mathematics, and support 29 languages, including Chinese, English, French, and Spanish.
Among the most downloaded are Qwen2.5-Coder and Qwen2.5-Math, which have amassed over 40 million downloads on Hugging Face and ModelScope platforms.
Alibaba Cloud also showcased innovations in AI-generated media. Its updated Tongyi Wanxiang picture generator now features a text-to-video model, capable of producing content in both realistic and animated styles, with applications in advertising, entertainment, and filmmaking.
Further bolstering its AI suite, Alibaba introduced Qwen 2-VL, the latest vision-language model, which can process videos over 20 minutes in length. The model supports video-based Q&A and is optimized for mobile devices and robotics, pointing to future applications in smart assistants, automation, and edge AI.
