AI Daily: Alibaba unveils latest AI model, claims competitive performance

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

LATEST AI MODEL: Alibaba (BABA), the China-based e-commerce “giant,” debuted the latest iteration of its artificial intelligence model, “claiming it surpasses DeepSeek’s AI model across various benchmarks,” wrote the Wall street Journal’s Kimberley Kao. “The company stated that Qwen2.5 Max “achieves competitive performance against the top-tier models,” referencing OpenAI’s GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Meta’s Llama-3.1-405B, based on its compiled comparison using various benchmark tests,” noted the WSJ story.

AI KEY RULES: The Consumer Federation of American and Mozilla wrote a letter to the White House, asking President Donald Trump to keep “key rules” in place for AI testing and transparency, Hayden Field of CNBC reports. The letter follows Trump’s decision to revoke former President Biden’s 2023 executive order on AI requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI’s impact on the labor market. Publicly traded companies associated with artificial intelligence or AI, and other possible AI infrastructure firms include Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), Palantir (PLTR), Broadcom (AVGO), Tesla (TSLA), and Intel (INTC).

DEEPSEEK ON AZURE AI FOUNDRY: Microsoft announced that DeepSeek R1 is now available in the model catalog on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, joining a diverse portfolio of over 1,800 models, including frontier, open-source, industry-specific, and task-based AI models. As part of Azure AI Foundry, DeepSeek R1 is accessible on a trusted, scalable, and enterprise-ready platform, enabling businesses to seamlessly integrate advanced AI while meeting SLAs, security, and responsible AI commitments-all backed by Microsoft’s reliability and innovation.

STOCK CONSIDERATIONS: BofA lowered the firm’s price target on Constellation Energy (CEG) to $366 from $380 and kept a Buy rating on the shares. Constellation and Vistra (VST) sold off significantly on Monday in the wake of AI application DeepSeek purportedly having lower cost and higher efficiency than other large scale, more expensive AI models, notes the firm, which believes that this selloff was “an overreaction to this news.” Data center demand is likely to continue over the intermediate term, but the longer term has “a lower probability of the mega growth bull case,” and there is a slightly higher downside risk to efficiency gains sooner than BofA had anticipated, for which the firm adjusted its valuations of the pair.