Alibaba Staff Worked Through Holiday After DeepSeek Breakthrough

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s engineers canceled vacations and worked through the Lunar New Year holiday to play catch up after DeepSeek shocked the global tech industry with its low-cost, powerful artificial-intelligence model in January.

The Chinese e-commerce company realized it had fallen behind in AI after the introduction of DeepSeek’s R1 model, Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai said at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Wednesday. He offered the anecdote as an example of how competitive the Chinese tech industry has become.