[BEIJING] Alibaba Group Holding unveiled a new version of its AI assistant mobile app that incorporates its latest in-house model, another in a series of product rollouts intended to help the company keep pace with Chinese artificial intelligence rivals.
It re-tooled the Quark app to take advantage of its flagship Qwen reasoning model. “New Quark” now integrates functions including a chatbot, deep thinking and task execution into a one-stop app, the company said in a statement. Based on a Web browser Alibaba introduced in 2016, it can handle tasks from image generation to travel planning, similar to what ByteDance’s Doubao can offer to users, it said. The company posted a demonstration video that showed the app writing articles from pictures and generating minutes for meetings.
New Quark will be available to all users gradually, starting with a pilot launched on Thursday (Mar 13). Its launch comes just a day after Alibaba launched an R1-Omni model that it said can read emotions. Both join a flurry of product updates and announcements from Chinese firms after Hangzhou-based DeepSeek stunned Silicon Valley with a model comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but apparently developed at a fraction of the cost.
“As our model capabilities continue to evolve, we envision Quark as a gateway to endless possibilities where users can explore everything with AI,” Wu Jia, CEO of Quark and an Alibaba vice-president, said in the statement.
Competition on the AI applications front is rising. A Chinese startup made a splash last week with the Manus AI agent it claimed is capable of executing complicated tasks like analyzing stocks or writing marketing plans for users. The tool is also only open to select users so far.
Alibaba accelerated efforts to carve out a leading position in AI after DeepSeek’s splashy debut in January.
The ecommerce leader is now pushing out AI tools and apps in several arenas. It benchmarked its Qwen model against DeepSeek, secured a major partnership with Apple for AI on iPhones, and now aims to take on OpenAI as well. It’s offering the R1-Omni for users for free on Hugging Face. BLOOMBERG
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