Alibaba claims its Qwen 3.5 model is way superior to one of DeepSeek’s. Well, is Alibaba in it for the hype of the race or to truly innovate AI?
Much of the AI focus is shifting from the US to China right now. There’s serious competition brewing, and the AI agents that are popping up are no joke.
ByteDance’s Doubao has been a constant topic in headlines for a couple of weeks. Now it’s leading the chart with over 200 million active users. That’s after DeepSeek rattled the markets last year.
Now illuminating the headlines is Alibaba’s new Qwen 3.5 model.
Some of the features under the limelight?
- 60% cheaper than the previous versions.
- Handles huge tasks 8 times better.
- Has visual agentic capabilities across the web and app (perform abilities independently)
- Performs at the level of the leading US models (as per Alibaba’s survey)
And even in China? Alibaba just raised the level of competition.
It all began with a coupon campaign.
Alibaba was distributing shopping coupons directly through its chatbot. And that, of course, drew in customers at an alarming rate. But this positioned Qwen as more than merely a question-answer assistant. It’s positioned the bot under a fresh spotlight.
This campaign encouraged consumers to make purchases across Alibaba-owned retail platforms- through AI prompts. All of this effort was meant to elevate user engagement for Alibaba, keeping the chatbot at the front and center. And the actual numbers were beyond what anyone had expected: 10 million orders in the first 9 hours.
It’ll come to be regarded as one of the most happening AI marketing campaigns of the year. Because the AI promise here- of offering users’ convenience and accessibility- materialized to an exciting extent.
So much so that Alibaba’s Qwen even faced glitches and technical setbacks during the campaign. The e-commerce platform had to urge customers to ease their activity.
During one such moment, Qwen responded to a user with-
“Everyone’s enthusiasm for experiencing AI shopping is too high! Currently, there are too many participants in ‘Qwen free order’, we are working tirelessly to maintain the campaign’s experience.”
Alibaba has been working on the user interface and integrating the bot across its other apps. And now it’s also planning on allowing customers to complete purchases without having to leave the applications.
As much as this is about users, it’s also imperative to the ongoing AI race. As all the abilities of AI are being tested, only a few will make an actual impact. That’s precisely what Alibaba hopes to do- help enterprises (not merely individuals) operate faster and do more with the same amount of compute.
