The recent rise of DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen artificial intelligence platforms is a hot topic among technology experts and investors in China and the United States. Yet specific information about the Chinese engineering teams remains scarce.
An Asia Times analysis using public information on the backgrounds of the two chatbots’ developers may help draw a clearer picture of how DeepSeek and Qwen emerged.
Based on publicly available research papers and media reports, DeepSeek and Qwen’s engineering teams do not collaborate or overlap.
The only linkage between the duo is that DeepSeek’s researchers said in a paper on January 22 this year that they had “distilled” Qwen2.5, and also Meta’s Llama, to develop DeepSeek-R1. The launch of DeepSeek-R1 caused…