Alibaba’s Qwen returns 22 per cent in 2 weeks, beats DeepSeek, OpenAI in crypto trading showdown
Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen3-Max posts a 22.32 per cent return on a US$10,000 investment in two weeks, topping a “real money” AI crypto trading test
An artificial intelligence model developed by Alibaba Group Holding has emerged as the top performer in a high-profile “real money, real market” experiment that pitted six leading US and Chinese systems against one another in cryptocurrency trading.
In the first round of testing on US research firm Nof1’s Alpha Arena, which concluded on Tuesday, Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen3-Max model generated a 22.32 per cent return on an initial investment of US$10,000 over two weeks. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Tasked with investing in cryptocurrency perpetual contracts on the decentralised exchange Hyperliquid, the only other model to turn a profit was DeepSeek’s V3.1 Chat, also from China, which gained 4.89 per cent.
All four US models – from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk’s xAI – recorded heavy losses. OpenAI’s GPT-5 fared worst, dropping 62.66 per cent.
The experiment was widely tracked among AI enthusiasts for the past two weeks as all the models’ trades, executed autonomously, were made accessible through their respective Hyperliquid wallet addresses. The real-time returns on their trades were logged in a public leaderboard, sparking online discussions about their strategies.
Nof1 in a blog post cautioned that the early results “may be the result of luck”, however, as the models were given only quantitative market data and had no access to news.