Alibaba Group's release of an artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning model, which it said was on par with global hit DeepSeek's R1, drove its Hong Kong-listed shares more than 8% higher on Thursday.

Alibaba Cloud on Thursday launched QwQ-32B, a compact reasoning model built on its latest large language model (LLM), Qwen2.5-32b, one it says delivers performance comparable to other large cutting edge models, including Chinese rival DeepSeek and OpenAI’s o1, with only 32 billion parameters.

Alibaba developed QwQ-32B through two training sessions. The first session focused on teaching the model math and coding skills. To support the learning process, Alibaba set up a server that ran the code QwQ-32B produced during training and checked it for errors.