Qwen3-Max Thinking beats Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.2 on Humanity's Last Exam (with search)

Chinese AI and tech firms continue to impress with their development of cutting-edge, state-of-the-art AI language models.

Today, the one drawing eyeballs is Alibaba Cloud's Qwen Team of AI researchers and its unveiling of a new proprietary language reasoning model, Qwen3-Max-Thinking.

You may recall, as VentureBeat covered last year, that Qwen has made a name for itself in the fast-moving global AI marketplace by shipping a variety of powerful, open source models in various modalities, from text to image to spoken audio. The company even earned an endorsement from U.S. tech lodgings giant Airbnb, whose CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky said the company was relying on Qwen's free, open source models as a more affordable alternative to U.S. offerings like those of OpenAI.

Now, with the proprietary Qwen3-Max-Thinking, the Qwen Team is aiming to match and, in some cases, outpace the reasoning capabilities of GPT-5.2 ...