Alibaba Group Holding’s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Quark is making waves across Chinese social media on the back of positive reviews, raising its prospects of becoming a “killer app” in this field. Launched earlier this month, Quark was remade by Alibaba into an all-in-one AI assistant, powered by the company’s Qwen reasoning AI model and designed for general users, following years of service as an online-search and cloud-storage tool. “I was quite shocked after trying out Quark,” said Charles Zhao, Founder of Chinese internet portal Sohu, in a post on his Weibo. “By judging the user’s intention, it automatically deploys different functions to complete the task.”
Zhao said he was quite satisfied with the answers Quark provided on two questions related to cosmology that he posed using its deep-thinking mode. That function reflects how Alibaba’s advances in foundational AI models would be helpful in upgrading its various businesses and those of its enterprise clients. It also shows Alibaba’s ambition to be competitive in the emerging market for AI agents, such as Chinese start-up Butterfly Effect’s Manus and OpenAI’s Deep Research. These are programs that are capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system using its available resources.
Quark users indicated that the app’s simple interface, like a traditional search engine, now allows them to easily use AI in their daily life. Since its launch, Alibaba’s AI assistant app has appeared on Weibo’s trending topics under “Quark AI”, which has become the Chinese microblogging platform’s ninth hottest topic. Quark, which already had more than 200 million users before it was revamped, provides a huge potential for expanding Alibaba’s reach in the consumer-facing AI market. Alibaba has yet to announce the latest user numbers of Quark post-launch. Alibaba’s Qwen series is already at the forefront of open-source AI models in terms of performance. The company’s latest reasoning model QwQ-32B, which was unveiled earlier this month, has either matched or outperformed DeepSeek’s R1 in areas such as maths, coding and general problem-solving, according to the Qwen team.
“We believe the integration of large AI models has immense potential to enhance search, productivity, content creation and workplace efficiency,” Alibaba Chief Executive Eddie Wu said during the company’s earnings call. Quark is also expected to serve as an add-on to enhance the capabilities of Alibaba’s existing computing infrastructure, the South China Morning Post reports.
