Alibaba’s [BABA +1.69%] Qwen3-Max AI model won the first season of the Alpha Arena crypto trading contest, which ended on 3 November 2025, with a 22.32% return on USD 10,000 in two weeks.
The contest, run by US research firm Nof1, pitted six AI models against each other in automated trading on the Hyperliquid exchange using only quantitative market data — with no access to news or external information.
Only two Chinese models were profitable: after Qwen3, DeepSeek V3.1 Chat came second with a 4.89% return, while four US models — GPT-5 (OpenAI), Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google DeepMind), Claude 4.5 Sonnet (Anthropic) and Grok 4 (Elon Musk’s xAI) — all suffered heavy losses.
GPT-5 performed worst, losing 62.66% and leaving about USD 3,733. Gemini 2.5 Pro also lost about 57% of its capital between 18 October and 3 November.
Nof1 stressed that these initial results may partly reflect luck and said it plans to use more rigorous statistical methods in future seasons to evaluate AI model performance in real market conditions.
