Alibaba Group’s Qwen artificial intelligence (AI) application soared past 10 million downloads within a week of its relaunch as the Chinese tech giant upped the ante in its push to challenge OpenAI ChatGPT.
Shares of the e-commerce company rose more than 5% Monday in Hong Kong following the company’s announcement, shared via a WeChat blog post. The surge in downloads came after Alibaba rebranded and consolidated its existing iOS and Android apps under the unified Qwen name earlier this month.
The rapid adoption places Qwen among the fastest-growing AI apps, particularly in China where ChatGPT remains unavailable. While OpenAI’s ChatGPT previously set records by reaching 100 million users in its first months three years ago, Qwen’s performance demonstrates strong demand for AI tools in the Chinese market.
Separately, Alibaba’s fintech affiliate, Ant Group Co., announced over the weekend that its new multimodal AI assistant LingGuang surpassed one million downloads in its first four days following last week’s launch.
Alibaba plans to roll out agentic AI features in the coming months to support online shopping across its platforms, including its flagship Taobao marketplace, with the goal of transforming Qwen into a fully functioning AI agent. The company, under CEO Eddie Wu, has repositioned itself as an AI-first business.
According to Alibaba, the company intends to integrate essential lifestyle and productivity services into the Qwen app, including digital maps, food delivery, travel booking, office tools, e-commerce, education, and health guidance.
The Qwen update represents the latest dispatch from major tech players engaged in an increasingly rapid game of large language model (LLM) leapfrog, with each company breathlessly claiming superior performance.
Anthropic kicked off the competitive sprint in late September with Claude Sonnet 4.5, which the company bills as “the best coding model in the world,” capable of working autonomously for more than 30 hours on complex tasks.
OpenAI followed in mid-November with GPT-5.1, an incremental but significant update to its August 2025 GPT-5 release. The new version offers two variants: GPT-5.1 Instant, designed for warmer, more conversational interactions, and GPT-5.1 Thinking, which features enhanced reasoning with adaptive thinking time.
Google closed out the flurry last week with Gemini 3 Pro, just seven months after Gemini 2.5. The tech giant asserts it is their most intelligent model to date, boasting breakthrough performance on coding and reasoning benchmarks.
This compressed timeline underscores the intense competition driving the AI sector, where major model updates now arrive every few months rather than annually, pushing the boundaries of coding, reasoning, and autonomous capabilities.
