China’s Alibaba has introduced a major upgrade to its artificial intelligence chatbot as it aims to expand its presence in the consumer artificial intelligence market. The company has lagged behind several rivals in this space. The new free application is based on the most advanced version of its Qwen large language model. It is now available in China as both a mobile app and a website. Alibaba said an international version will be released later.
According to the company, the upgraded chatbot can handle complex tasks with a single instruction. Alibaba said, “With a single command, it can generate a full research report and automatically produce a polished, multi slide PowerPoint presentation in seconds.” The Qwen app has now entered public beta testing. In a separate statement, the company described it as “the best personal AI assistant with the most powerful model.”
This launch marks a strategic change for Alibaba. Until now, the company has not invested heavily in a ChatGPT style consumer application. Instead, it focused on enterprise customers who use its cloud services.
The announcement comes at a time when China’s artificial intelligence sector is seeing an intense price war. This was triggered by DeepSeek, which has focused on low cost artificial intelligence computing and app development. The move has pushed other companies to follow similar pricing strategies.
Alibaba has released consumer facing artificial intelligence apps before. These included the Tongyi app, from which Qwen has now been rebranded, as well as artificial intelligence assistant features inside its Quark browser. However, this is the first time Alibaba has made a strong push to win over everyday users.
Alibaba was among the first Chinese companies to launch a consumer artificial intelligence assistant in late 2023, but Tongyi did not achieve large scale popularity. Data from a common artificial intelligence product tracker shows that Tongyi had 6.96 million monthly active users in September. In comparison, market leader Doubao from ByteDance had 150 million monthly active users. DeepSeek had 73.4 million users, and Tencent recorded 64.2 million.
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