Saad Ullah
● According to Daily Dose of Data Science, China just made another big move in AI. Alibaba's Tongyi Lab released Tongyi DeepResearch, a fully open-source language model that's now competing directly with top Western AI systems. Despite having 30.5 billion total parameters, it only activates 3.3 billion per token, making it surprisingly efficient while outperforming Anthropic's Claude 4 Sonnet.
● What makes Tongyi DeepResearch different is its focus on agentic AI—systems that can reason independently, conduct research, and handle complex information retrieval. Unlike typical chatbots, this model excels at deep, long-form research tasks. It scored impressively on benchmarks like Humanity's Last Exam, BrowserComp, WebWalkerQA, and SimpleQA. Of course, releasing such a powerful model as open-source comes with concerns about misuse and ethical alignment.
● Financially, Alibaba's strategy is interesting. By going open-source instead of keeping it proprietary, they're positioning themselves as infrastructure leaders rather than just another AI vendor. This move could accelerate China's AI ecosystem, lower development costs for others, and drive more business to Alibaba Cloud. It's a direct challenge to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
● Tongyi DeepResearch shows that China isn't just catching up—they're competing at the highest level, particularly in reasoning and search-based intelligence.
Saad Ullah
