Alibaba has just unveiled its latest reasoning model, and it seems that DeepSeek and OpenAI might have something to worry about — at least if all of Alibaba’s promises turn out to be true. It’s open-source, so I checked it out. You can try it out for free, too, although unsurprisingly, you’ll find that there are some things it won’t talk to you about.
The new model, dubbed QwQ-32b (Quan-with-Questions) runs on much fewer parameters, meaning that it requires less resources, but Alibaba claims that it performs at the same level as DeepSeek or OpenAI’s o1-mini.
DeepSeek’s R1 large language model (LLM) was all the rage earlier in February when it came out, suddenly capable of rivaling the golden standard set by ChatGPT and other alternatives, but at a much lower cost. It seems that Alibaba might be pushing the envelope even further here.
As explained by VentureBeat, DeepSeek-R1 requires 671 billion parameters to run, 37 billion of which are activated. Meanwhile, Alibaba’s new QwQ-32b can get by with 32 billion parameters. Those numbers are totally abstract to many, but there’s a huge difference in compute power; while DeepSeek R1 requires 1600GB of VRAM to run, QwQ-32b can get by with just 24GB of VRAM. In most cases, this will mean Nvidia’s H100 or equivalents, but even the gaming-focused RTX 4090 sports 24GB. The latest RTX 5090 ups that to 32GB.
Alibaba’s QwQ-32b is available under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning that companies and researchers can use it. More importantly, we can use it by trying out Alibaba’s Qwen Chat. Like DeepSeek, it comes with some limitations, but also has a couple of immediate perks that I noticed quite quickly.
It seems to give quite in-depth answers even to quick, simple questions. This can be good, but in a way, it was mostly annoying as it gives you a lot of unnecessary context that you didn’t ask for. I like that it shows you its whole reasoning process, though, which is similar to ChatGPT’s Deep Thinking feature — but with much less depth.
When asked about political matters, Qwen Chat flags it as inappropriate. There might be ways to jailbreak it — it was possible with DeepSeek, after all — but I haven’t managed to just yet.
Whether Alibaba’s claims turn out to be true remains to be seen, but it looks like ChatGPT and DeepSeek now have a new rival.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.