Alibaba Group Holding’s new multipurpose artificial intelligence app, Qwen, recorded more than 10 million downloads in the first week of its public beta launch, faster than OpenAI’s ChatGPT or DeepSeek, the company said on Monday.
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The strong debut of Qwen, launched last week, augured well for the Chinese tech conglomerate’s efforts to establish a major AI assistant that would rival the performance of Google’s Gemini chatbot and ChatGPT, both of which are not available in mainland China.
The Hong Kong-listed shares of Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, gained 4.67 per cent to close at HK$154.50 on Monday. Alibaba’s latest quarterly financial results are set to be released on Tuesday.
Qwen marked “Alibaba’s most significant step yet into the consumer AI market, aiming to transform its cutting-edge foundational AI model capabilities into real-life applications and tools”, the company said in a statement on Monday.
Powered by Alibaba Cloud’s open-source AI model family of the same name, Qwen was designed to meet both the professional and personal needs of users, with capabilities that include deep research, image generation and slide generation.
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Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud services unit of Hangzhou-based Alibaba.