On November 17, Alibaba officially announced the "Qwen" project, fully entering the AI to C market. On the same day, the public beta version of Qwen APP was launched. Based on the world's top-performing open-source model Qwen3, it competes comprehensively with ChatGPT by being free and integrating with various life scenarios. The core management of Alibaba regards the "Qwen" project as the "battle for the future in the AI era."
Currently, the public beta version of Qwen APP is available on major app stores and also provides web and PC versions. The international version of Qwen APP for the global market will be launched soon, directly competing with ChatGPT for overseas users by leveraging the overseas influence of the Qwen model.
In February this year, Alibaba announced an investment of 38 billion yuan for AI infrastructure construction and set a long-term goal of expanding the energy consumption scale of cloud data centers tenfold by 2032. Since fully open-sourcing in 2023, Alibaba's Qwen has surpassed models like Llama and Deepseek, becoming the most powerful and widely used open-source large model globally. To date, the global download count of the Qwen series model has exceeded 600 million, accumulating significant industry reputation. Recently, Alibaba released the flagship model Qwen3-Max, whose performance surpasses international competitors such as GPT5 and Claude Opus4, placing it among the top three globally.
Qwen is rapidly capturing the Silicon Valley market. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky publicly stated that the company is "heavily relying on Qwen," as it is faster and better than openAI models. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said that Qwen has captured a large share of the global open-source model market and continues to expand its share. Alibaba's open-source model Qwen is becoming the foundation of Silicon Valley.
Alibaba's management believes that the development of AI will go through three stages: "learning from people," "assisting people," and "exceeding people." Currently, the capabilities of large models have entered the Agentic AI stage of "assisting people," and the timing for Alibaba to heavily enter the consumer market is now mature.
Alibaba stated that the Qwen APP released this time is a preliminary version, which will use the most advanced model to create a "smart personal AI assistant that can chat and handle tasks." In addition to being smart in chatting, "being able to handle tasks" will be a key focus area for the Qwen APP. The strategic goal of Qwen APP is to become the AI lifestyle entrance of the future.
Currently, Qwen has already shown some ability to handle tasks. For example, one instruction can allow the Qwen APP to complete a research report in a few seconds and turn it into a beautiful PowerPoint with dozens of pages. Not long ago, Qwen won the championship in a real-time investment competition against global top models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok.
It has been revealed that Alibaba is planning to integrate various life scenarios such as maps, food delivery, ticket booking, office work, learning, shopping, and health into the Qwen APP, enabling Qwen to have stronger task-handling capabilities.
