Prime Highlight
- Alibaba’s relaunched Qwen AI app surpassed 10 million downloads within a week, significantly strengthening the company’s global consumer AI push.
- The rapid adoption supports CEO Eddie Wu’s strategy of positioning Alibaba as an AI-first company, ahead of its upcoming financial results.
Key Facts
- Qwen is powered by Alibaba Cloud’s open-source LLM and supports research, image generation, and slide creation, with plans to integrate services like maps, food delivery, and e-commerce.
- Ant Group’s AI assistant LingGuang reached over 2 million downloads within days, reflecting accelerating AI competition among Chinese tech companies.
Background
Alibaba’s newly updated artificial intelligence app, Qwen, has recorded more than 10 million downloads within a week of its relaunch, giving a strong boost to the company’s push into the global consumer AI market. The rapid adoption lifted Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares by almost 5% on Monday.
The launch marks one of Alibaba’s most significant moves under CEO Eddie Wu, who has positioned the company as an AI-first business. The strong performance of Qwen comes just ahead of Alibaba’s quarterly financial results, where investors are expected to focus on the company’s AI strategy and growth plans.
Qwen is powered by Alibaba Cloud’s open-source large language model of the same name. The app is designed to support both personal and professional tasks, including deep research, image generation and slide creation. Alibaba said the goal is to turn advanced AI capabilities into useful, everyday tools.
The app was released in a public beta and is already being described as a future “everything app” for consumers in China and beyond. Alibaba plans to integrate services such as food delivery, maps, travel bookings, e-commerce, health and education into upcoming versions.
The strong reception follows a similar success from Ant Group, Alibaba’s fintech affiliate, which recently launched its own AI assistant LingGuang. The multimodal app has achieved more than 2 million downloads in just a few days and topped the free tool charts in China’s App Store. Ant Group has been increasing its AI efforts, including upgrades to its Bailing language model and the launch of robotics innovations.
Alibaba’s latest progress shows that Chinese tech companies are speeding up their work on generative AI, especially since major Western AI tools like ChatGPT are not available in mainland China.
