New Google research into DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud’s artificial intelligence models has found that powerful reasoning models capable of “thinking” demonstrated internal cognition resembling the mechanisms underpinning human collective intelligence.

The findings published on Thursday suggested that perspective diversity, not just computational scale, was responsible for the increasing “intelligence” of AI models, while also underscoring the growing importance of Chinese open models for cutting-edge interdisciplinary research in the US.

Through experimentation with DeepSeek’s R1 and Alibaba Cloud’s QwQ-32B models, the researchers found that these reasoning models generated internal multi-agent debates, which they termed “societies of thought”, in which the interplay of distinct personality traits and domain expertise gave rise to greater capabilities.

“We suggest that reasoning models establish a computational parallel to collective intelligence in human groups, where diversity enables superior problem-solving when systematically structured,” the researchers said in their paper published on open-access online repository arXiv.

Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post.

The Alibaba Qwen logo is seen on a smartphone screen with an AI neural technology concept image behind it. Photo: Shutterstock Images

The study, which has not been peer-reviewed, was conducted by four researchers from Google’s “Paradigms of Intelligence” research team, which explores the nature of intelligence through interdisciplinary methods.