Alibaba's Qwen storms past 10 million downloads, takes on global AI giants

Qwen, Alibaba's new AI assistant, saw over 10 million downloads in a week, boosting the company's push to build a powerful AI app that can compete with ChatGPT

Alibaba Group Holding’s new artificial intelligence (AI) assistant app, Qwen, reached over 10 million downloads within the first week of its public beta launch, the company said on Monday. This makes Qwen’s early performance stronger than OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DeepSeek during their initial launch phases, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.

 

Launched last week, Qwen is part of Alibaba’s push to build a powerful AI assistant that can compete with global leaders like Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT, both unavailable in mainland China.

 

Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed stock closed 4.67 per cent higher at HK$154.50 on Monday. The company is scheduled to release its quarterly results on Tuesday, the news report said.

 

In a statement, Alibaba said Qwen marked “Alibaba’s most significant step yet into the consumer AI market, aiming to transform its cutting-edge foundational AI model capabilities into real-life applications and tools".

 

What the Qwen app can do

 

Qwen is powered by Alibaba Cloud’s open-source AI model family, also called Qwen. It is designed to help users with both personal and professional tasks. The app can perform deep research, generate images and create presentation slides.

 

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing and AI arm of the Hangzhou-based company, said Qwen would eventually become an all-in-one “everything app”. It is already available on Apple’s iOS and Android platforms.     

 

Alibaba plans a global ‘everything app’

 

The fast adoption of Qwen in its first week strengthens Alibaba’s confidence in reaching a wider global audience. The company plans to launch an international version of Qwen that will integrate everyday services like maps, food delivery, travel bookings, office productivity tools, e-commerce, education and health services.

 

According to a report in the Post, new versions of Qwen will be rolled out quickly.

 

Alibaba’s Qwen3-Max leads in real-market trial

 

Alibaba’s advanced AI model, Qwen3-Max, beat five major global AI systems in a live cryptocurrency trading experiment conducted by US research firm Nof1, SCMP reported.

 

In the first round of the “Alpha Arena” competition, Qwen3-Max earned a 22.32 per cent return on a starting investment of $10,000 in just two weeks. Only two out of six models made a profit.

 

China’s DeepSeek V3.1 Chat placed second with a 4.89 per cent return. Four leading US-based models, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk’s xAI, recorded heavy losses. OpenAI’s GPT-5 performed the worst, losing 62.66 per cent of its investment.

 

Nof1 noted that the early results “may be the result of luck”, adding that future rounds will have “more statistical rigour”.

 

The Alpha Arena experiment gives AI tools access only to quantitative market data, without news or external information. This raises questions about how these systems might behave in real-world investment scenarios.

 

Interestingly, Qwen3-Max was the only AI model in the test without reasoning capabilities, meaning it did not simulate step-by-step thinking before deciding on trades.