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(Reuters) -China's tech and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is planning to release Qwen 3, an upgraded version of its flagship AI model, as soon as this month, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the matter.
The new release may arrive later in April, although the exact timing could still change, the report said.
Alibaba did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.
AI companies have been releasing new products at a feverish pace in recent months, as competition has piled up after the meteoric rise of China's DeepSeek earlier this year. DeepSeek rocked the global AI industry with its new model that it said was cheaper to develop than its Western rivals.
Alibaba was one of the first companies to respond to DeepSeek's global success in late January, releasing Qwen 2.5-Max, an upgraded version of its flagship model, just days later and claiming that it surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.
The unusual timing of Qwen 2.5-Max's release on the first day of the Lunar New Year, when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, highlighted the pressure DeepSeek has placed on its rivals, including those in China.
Reuters reported in February that DeepSeek was accelerating the launch of the successor to the R1 model, which, along with V3, had received widespread praise across Silicon Valley. DeepSeek plans to release the next-generation model before May, the report had said.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru and Eduardo Baptista in Beijing; Editing by Leroy Leo)
