Alibaba’s Qwen AI Outperforms Global Rivals in Math Benchmarks, Sparking East-West AI Race
Alibaba's Qwen3-Max-Thinking has achieved a historic milestone, scoring perfect marks in the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) and Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament (HMMT). This marks China's first flawless performance in reasoning-heavy AI benchmarks, positioning the country as a serious contender in advanced artificial intelligence.
The achievement places Alibaba's model in direct competition with OpenAI's GPT-5 Pro, which recently reported similar results. The rivalry underscores a growing East-West divide in AI development, with both tech giants vying for supremacy in reasoning capabilities.
Questions linger about verification, however. Unlike some Western counterparts, Alibaba's results lack third-party validation or evidence of closed-book testing. Despite these concerns, the company has opened API access to developers, potentially offering cost-performance advantages across Asia-Pacific markets.
