The AI race gets frantic as Alibaba throws down a challenge at DeepSeek just days after ByteDance launches its own new AI model.

Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI's o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.

The Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek has rattled markets with claims its latest AI model performs on a par with those of OpenAI, despite using less advanced, more energy efficient compute