Alibaba on Thursday released more than 100 open-source artificial intelligence models and boosted the capabilities of its proprietary technology as it looks to ramp up competition with rivals.

The newly-released models, known as Qwen 2.5, are designed for use in applications and sectors ranging from automobiles to gaming and science research, Alibaba said. They have more advanced capabilities in math and coding, it added.

The Hangzhou-headquartered firm is looking to increase competition with domestic rivals such as Baidu and Huawei, as well as U.S. titans like Microsoft and OpenAI.

AI models are trained on huge amounts of data. Alibaba says its models have the ability to understand prompts and generate texts and images.

Open-source means that anyone — including researchers, academics and companies — around the world can use the models to create their own generative AI apps without needing to train their own systems, saving time and expense. By open sourcing the models, Alibaba hopes more users will use its AI.

The Chinese e-commerce giant first launched its Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen, model last year. Since then, it has released improved versions and says that, to date, its open source models have been downloaded 40 million times.

The company also said that it upgraded its proprietary flagship model called Qwen-Max, which is not open-source. Instead, Alibaba sells its capabilities through its cloud computing products to businesses. Alibaba said that Qwen Max 2.5-Max surpassed rivals such as Meta‘s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT4 in several areas including reasoning and language comprehension.

Alibaba also launched a new text-to-video tool based on its AI models. This allows users to input a prompt and the AI will create a video based on it. This is similar to OpenAI’s Sora.

“Alibaba Cloud is investing, with unprecedented intensity, in the research and development of AI technology and the building of its global infrastructure,” Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba, said in a statement.

Wu, who took over the role of CEO at Alibaba last year amid a historic reshuffle, has been trying to reinvigorate growth at the tech giant, as it faces headwinds including rising competition and a sluggish Chinese consumer.

Alibaba is one of the biggest cloud computing players in China, but internationally, it trails the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. The company is hoping that its latest AI offerings may tempt customers inside and outside of China to sign up to its cloud services, boosting a division which has been sluggish but showed early sign of an acceleration in the June quarter.

Google had been in talks to acquire marketing software maker HubSpot earlier this year, but no deal took place. The company then made a run at cybersecurity startup Wiz. But that didn’t happen either.

Google took a different tactic in closing its one notable transaction of late. Following a model pursued by Amazon and Microsoft to lure experts in artificial intelligence, Google announced last month it was hiring the founders of generative AI startup Character.AI. Rather than buying Character outright and shutting it down — the standard acquihire playbook — Google kept the startup alive and entered into a licensing deal for its technology.

This is the new world of tech M&A. Under the Biden administration, and more specifically Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan, the biggest companies have been thwarted from pursuing large deals. In some cases, they’ve even walked away from smaller deals. Amazon abandoned its $1.7 billion purchase of iRobot in January after the FTC and European regulators raised concerns.

Since peaking at $1.5 trillion in 2021, tech transaction volume has plummeted, dropping to $544 billion last year, according to Dealogic. So far in 2024, that number sits at $465 billion.

Within tech, private equity buyers are the ones keeping the market afloat. In July, BlackRock agreed to buy data provider Preqin for $3.2 billion, two months after Permira announced it was buying website-building platform Squarespace in a deal valued at almost $7 billion. Thoma Bravo, a leading tech buyout firm, said in July it was selling Instructure to KKR for $4.8 billion.

Don’t expect much to change for the rest of this year. With the presidential election coming in November, the regulatory environment could be poised for a shake-up, potentially leading to the removal of deal-making barriers.

However, neither party offers much clarity for what the future would bring. Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate on the Republican ticket, has praised Khan’s stricter rules on mergers, and he told CNBC last week that “there should be an antitrust solution” to some of the behaviors of large tech platforms.

On the Democratic side, billionaire donors Barry Diller and Reid Hoffman have voiced concerns about Khan keeping her job if Vice President Kamala Harris wins.

“If Trump wins, I think that the regulatory environment will still be fairly challenging, and under a challenging regulatory environment, that just limits big deals,” said Andrew Luh, a partner at law firm Gunderson Dettmer who represents startups in mergers and acquisitions.

The Biden administration’s crackdown on Big Tech has gone well beyond squashing M&A.

Alphabet is in the midst of its second antitrust trial, following charges from the Justice Department that the company acted as a monopoly in search and advertising. The DOJ sued Apple on antitrust grounds in March. The FTC has cases pending against Meta and Amazon.

Couple that with a similarly rigid environment in Europe, and no deal appears safe. In December, Adobe walked away from its $20 billion agreement to purchase design software startup Figma, and paid a $1 billion breakup fee. In a statement, the companies said, “there is no clear path to receive necessary regulatory approvals from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority.”

In July, Figma said it had completed a tender offer valuing the design software startup at $12.5 billion. Figma is viewed as a strong IPO candidate when that market eventually reopens. But alongside a plummeting M&A market, initial public offerings are also in an extended drought as companies continue to adapt to drastically reduced valuations wrought by the economic slowdown starting in 2022.

A Figma spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s plans.

Dana Rao, who at the time was Adobe’s general counsel, announced his departure earlier this month after 12 years at the company. Rao said in a December interview that Adobe leadership felt justified in pursuing Figma after the failure of its competing product design program. But regulators were taking a different view.

“We’ve had a lot of interaction with the regulators, and they’ve been very focused on the newer doctrines of antitrust law that say that future competition is a critical part of the antitrust analysis,” he said.

Jonathan Kanter, head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said in a statement after Adobe backed down that the move “ensures that designers, creators, and consumers continue to get the benefit of the rivalry between the two companies going forward.”

There are still deals taking place, outside the watchful eye of regulators.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise agreed in January to acquire networking hardware company Juniper for $14 billion. And this month, Salesforce said it was buying startup Own for $1.9 billion.

In those cases, management was less concerned about regulators and much more focused on how shareholders would respond due to the growing obsession with profitability, following the 2022 downturn.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri told CNBC that Juniper would add to non-GAAP earnings in year one.

“We have been very, very disciplined on returning invested capital, meaning every dollar spent has to deliver value to our shareholders,” Neri said in an interview. “And that’s why, in the case of Juniper, for example, we committed to a series of synergies that then more than pay for the cost of capital to make this acquisition.”

Neri told analysts in January that the two companies do business in some of the same markets, but in different verticals, and said that he didn’t anticipate protracted battles with regulators. In August, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority approved the tie-up.

Sergio Letelier, HPE’s head of corporate development, said that when he and his team members advise Neri on a potential deal, they always discuss how regulators might treat it. While some transactions are taking longer to close than they would have previously, “the fundamentals of what is a problematic deal vs. what is not a problematic deal hasn’t changed,” Letelier said.

At Salesforce, CEO Marc Benioff said that Own should bolster free cash flow in the second year after the deal closed. It’s Benioff’s first billion-dollar-plus acquisition since 2021, when the cloud software vendor paid $27 billion for Slack, its largest purchase ever. The DOJ’s Antitrust Division asked for additional information on that deal before clearing it.

In an interview last week, Benioff called U.S. regulators “somewhat dysfunctional” but applauded Europe for recognizing where competition really is being harmed. He specifically pointed to a recent finding by the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, that Microsoft had breached antitrust rules by tying Teams, its Slack competitor, to its core Office productivity applications.

“They’re the ones who are actually functional and who are doing serious work,” Benioff said, referring to the EU and U.K. “I think that it’s a big story that we’re following the Europeans in this regulatory environment.”

Since the Slack purchase, Salesforce has pursued only smaller deals, particularly after facing off with activist investors who pressured the company to put a renewed focus on profitability. Salesforce landed AI talent from buying Airkit and a Sales Cloud software add-on from Spiff.

“We’ve done more than 60 acquisitions,” Benioff said. “We’ve tried and failed a lot in M&A, but we have also succeeded in quite a few of them, especially the big ones.” Before Slack, Salesforce acquired Tableau Software and MuleSoft.

At Cisco, one of the first questions executives ask when evaluating a potential deal is how certain they are it will close, said Derek Idemoto, the networking hardware company’s head of corporate development.

“The question is, How much risk are you willing to take on the regulatory side, given how hard things are at this time and how litigious things could be,” said Idemoto, who’s worked on more than 100 deals in his nearly 17 years at the company.

Idemoto said that’s made Cisco more selective these days. Before the company announced its $27 billion purchase of data analytics software company Splunk last September, he said he viewed the risk as absolutely worth taking. Splunk sat comfortably outside Cisco’s core of networking equipment.

“Certainly it’s an offensive play for us,” Idemoto said.

The deal sailed through, even closing in March, six months ahead of schedule.

“Having a high confidence level when you sign something — that’s the Cisco way,” Idemoto said.

That level of confidence would be difficult for the megacap companies as long as the FTC and DOJ are aggressively watching them. Alphabet’s last big deal was its $5.4 billion purchase of cybersecurity company Mandiant in 2022. Microsoft closed its massive $75 billion purchase of Activision in October, but it took 20 months and a protracted fight with U.S. and European regulators. Amazon hasn’t had a billion-dollar-plus deal since closing the $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical in early 2023.

Last month, Amazon announced it was hiring a quarter of staffers from Covariant, which builds AI models for robots. It was the company’s second AI deal in the acquihire vein, following a similar agreement with Adept in June. Even that deal attracted an informal FTC inquiry.

Amazon didn’t provide a specific comment for this story, but said acquisitions are still part of its growth strategy and “are a critical and healthy part of an innovation economy.” Microsoft and Google declined to comment.

HPE’s Letelier said that any tech company considering its acquisition strategy will have a difficult time forecasting for the future because it’s not clear what changes Vice President Harris might make if she wins in November or what Trump would do if he returns to the White House.

Trump as president blocked some deals on national security grounds, following recommendations from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Regulators under President Joe Biden, meanwhile, have filed a record number of merger enforcement actions, Bloomberg reported.

“We’re at a crossroads here, and we don’t know which side of the fork the policy is going to go,” Letelier said.

WATCH: How Big Tech is quietly acquiring AI startups without actually buying the companies

It was a solid quarter for the companies in our stock portfolio, with the bulk of our names reporting what we felt were good-to-great earnings reports. Continued economic growth on the back of a resilient consumer and increasing business confidence ahead of what most expect to be a lower interest rate environment helped drive the results.

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Here’s what CNBC TV’s producers were watching during the rebound and what’s on the radar for the next session.

Inflation in the USA

• Two days of key data kick-off Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. ET with the producer price index, which looks at inflation from the wholesaler’s side of the equation. Economists predict the number was up 0.2% in July from the prior month.
• Wednesday we will get CPI, the consumer price index, also at 8:30 a.m. ET.
• The S&P 500 is down more than 5% from its high on July 16.
• The Nasdaq 100 is off about 10% from the July 10 high.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen about 5% from its July 18 high.

Gold

Home Depot

• The home improvement (and more) giant reports quarterly numbers before the bell.
• The stock is flat since last reporting three months ago.
• Home Depot is 13% from the stock’s March high.

Boeing

• The airline maker reports July orders and deliveries tomorrow morning.
• The stock is down about 10% since the last report a month ago.
• Boeing is down 38.6% from its 52-week high in December.

Nvidia’s rebound

• Seema Mody will report on Nvidia’s recent move.
• The stock was up 4.1% today and it’s up 8.5% in five sessions.
• Nvidia remains 22.5% from the 52-week high it hit on June 20.

The other six of the ‘Magnificent Seven’

• Meta is 5% from its July 8 high.
• Apple is 8.3% from its July 15 high.
• Microsoft is 13% from its July 5 high.
• Alphabet is 15.3% from its July 10 high.
• Amazon is 17% from its July 8 high.
• Tesla is 29% from its Sept. 15 high.

Tesla vs. China

• CNBC’s Eunice Yoon, who reports from China, will look at Tesla’s Chinese competitors tomorrow.
• All the big ones are down in August, over the last month and three months.
• Li Auto is down 27% in three months; the stock is 58% from its Feb. 27 high.
• Xpeng is down 25% in one month, and is 67% from its Sept. 1 high.
• BYD is down 13% in a month, 17% below its 52-week high.
• Zeekr is down 26% in a month, and has fallen 55% since its May 13 high.
• Nio is down 26% in three months, and has tumbled 71% since its 52-week high nearly a year ago.

13F filings

• CNBC will be checking on the stocks the biggest fundrunners in the country are buying and selling. The 13F filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which make these disclosures, start tomorrow.
• One filing that many pay attention to is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
• BRK.A is up 19% so far in 2024 and up 4% in three months.