Alibaba Group Holding has officially launched its multipurpose artificial intelligence app, Qwen, promising a “free-for-all” gateway for consumers to access a variety of AI-powered services, from mapping to shopping. Qwen, powered by Alibaba Cloud’s open-source model and marketed as “the best personal AI assistant”, serves not only as a chatbot but also as a comprehensive AI tool designed to meet user needs in both professional and personal contexts. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud services unit of Hangzhou-based Alibaba. Available on both Apple’s App Store and Google Play, Qwen is Alibaba’s latest initiative to make its AI capabilities widely accessible to consumers. By making the app free of charge and integrating multiple services, Qwen challenges the subscription-based AI business model favored by international competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic. At home, Qwen directly competes with rivals like ByteDance’s Doubao, as well as Zhipu AI, which offers basic services for free but charge for premium access.
Alibaba Cloud has been registering trademarks for Qwen across various sectors, including education, entertainment, social services and finance. The new app is likely to attract more users, which could help improve Alibaba Cloud’s AI models and services, according to analysts. “More users mean more feedback”, which would allow Alibaba to “further fine-tune its models”, said Su Lian Jye, Chief Analyst at consultancy Omdia. The launch comes at a time when Chinese AI start-ups Moonshot AI and state-backed Zhipu AI, known internationally as Z.ai, have started introducing subscription fees for their Kimi and ChatGLM services, respectively. Su noted that AI start-ups might struggle to compete with the Qwen app’s “free-for-all” strategy, which “will only work for cloud service providers that have large capital reserves and are able to monetize user data”. Alibaba Cloud has been pushing the adoption and commercialization of its Qwen series of models over the past two years amid the global AI surge initiated by OpenAI. As one of China’s leading AI developers, alongside start-ups like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, Alibaba Cloud has embraced an open-source approach, making its AI models available for third-party developers to use, modify and distribute.
Some observers in the U.S. have expressed concern over Alibaba’s rapid advancements and hefty investments, which position it among the world’s top AI developers. Alibaba rejected a recent report from the Financial Times, which alleged that it was supplying the Chinese military with unspecified capabilities that the White House claimed would threaten U.S. national security, the South China Morning Post reports.
Meanwhile, the Global Times adds that Ant Group, also part of the Alibaba ecosystem, launched Lingguang, the first AI assistant capable of generating multimodal content with full-code implementation, and capable of generating fully coded mini-apps on mobile devices in as little as 30 seconds through natural-language prompts, producing outputs that are editable, interactive and shareable.
