Alibaba is entering the competition for the AI super traffic entrance

Author | Huang Yu

Editor | Wang Xiaojun

In the global AI arms race over the past three years, Alibaba has primarily focused on AI infrastructure for the B-end, without investing too much energy in AI native applications for the C-end. Goldman Sachs has also suggested the viewpoint that "for China's AI industry, look to Alibaba for AI infrastructure and Tencent for AI applications."

However, Alibaba will not easily miss the opportunity to compete for the next generation of super traffic entrances. As 2025 approaches, it has dropped a heavy bombshell on the industry.

Four days after the news of Alibaba launching the "Qianwen" project, on November 17, Alibaba officially announced the public beta version of the Qianwen APP, stating that it aims to "compete comprehensively with ChatGPT based on the globally top-performing open-source model Qwen3, leveraging its free nature and integration with various life scenario ecosystems."

Clearly, with the continuous enhancement of the Qianwen model's capabilities, Alibaba believes the time has come for it to enter the frontline of AI native applications.

The Qianwen APP is the predecessor of Alibaba's first AI native application launched in September 2023—the Tongyi Qianwen APP (later renamed Tongyi APP). This "new debut" signifies Alibaba's ambition to fully enter the AI to C market and implicitly reflects its dissatisfaction with the app's previous monthly active users of only over 3 million.

The Qianwen APP has now positioned itself at the core of Alibaba's AI strategy, serving as its vanguard in seizing the next generation of super traffic entrances. Alibaba's core management team views the "Qianwen" project as "the future battle of the AI era."

However, this battle will not be easy. The competition for AI native applications has already lasted over two years and has shown signs of intensifying this year. From the current situation, ChatGPT, the global market leader, has reached 700 million monthly active users, while domestic competitors Doubao and DeepSeek are temporarily leading with over 100 million monthly active users.

Tech giants are all aiming for the super entrance of the AI era with full force, and the launch of Qianwen will undoubtedly intensify this competition. Whether the latecomer Alibaba can achieve a curve-over-take through Qianwen and reshape the landscape of AI native applications remains highly uncertain.

Benchmarking ChatGPT

This year, Alibaba has shown considerable combat effectiveness. The "Qianwen" project is another high-profile strategic initiative announced by Alibaba for 2025, following AI infrastructure and Taobao Flash Sale.

As early as November 13, market news indicated that Alibaba had secretly launched a strategic project named "Qianwen," aiming to create a personal AI assistant—Qianwen APP—centered around the strongest Qwen model, directly targeting ChatGPT.

On that day, Alibaba's stock price surged significantly, with an increase of up to 6%.

Now that the news has settled, according to Wall Street Insights, on November 16, the Qianwen APP quietly went live on major app stores To compete with ChatGPT, Alibaba has also announced that the international version of its Qianwen APP aimed at the global market will be launched soon, leveraging the overseas influence of the Qwen model to directly compete for overseas users with ChatGPT.

Alibaba stated that the Qianwen APP released this time is a basic version that will use the most advanced model to create a "personal AI assistant that can chat and get things done."

In addition to being smart enough to chat, "getting things done" will be an important direction for the future development of the Qianwen APP, especially in the area of daily life, where the Qianwen APP has already shown strong potential.

According to sources familiar with the matter, Alibaba is planning to integrate various life scenarios such as maps, food delivery, ticket booking, office work, learning, shopping, and health into the Qianwen APP, giving it stronger capabilities to get things done.

The reason Alibaba dares to directly challenge ChatGPT is that it has two trump cards: one is being completely free, and the other is its globally recognized underlying technological capabilities.

It is worth noting that as a "top player," ChatGPT currently offers both a free version and a paid subscription plan. The free version is open to everyone, but the number of messages, response speed, and features are limited. The paid plan is billed in US dollars, charging users monthly, with options for monthly or annual payments, and the Plus plan costs $20 per month, which is clearly a significant barrier to user growth.

Alibaba's investment in AI infrastructure is well-known. Building on its plan announced in February to invest 380 billion yuan in AI infrastructure over three years, Alibaba CEO Eric Wu revealed at the September Cloud Summit that the company plans to make even larger investments. He also stated that by 2032, the energy consumption scale of Alibaba Cloud's global data centers will increase tenfold from 2022 levels.

At the model level, Alibaba's open-source model Qwen has already gained global influence.

The "2025 AI Index Report" from Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Institute pointed out that the performance gap between top AI models in China and the US has narrowed significantly to 0.3%, nearly closing the gap, with Alibaba's Qwen model ranking third globally in terms of contribution.

Additionally, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed during the 2025 GTC conference that Qwen has the highest market share among global open-source models and is still growing.

Qwen has become the first choice for many developers and the enterprise market. A September report from Sullivan indicated that Alibaba Tongyi ranks first in the Chinese enterprise-level large model invocation market.

As of now, Alibaba's Qianwen Qwen has open-sourced over 300 models, with downloads in major global model communities exceeding 600 million, and derivative models surpassing 170,000, surpassing Meta's Llama to become the world's largest open-source model family.

It is not difficult to see that Alibaba is now uniformly promoting the model name as Qianwen Qwen, and the renaming of the Tongyi APP to Qianwen APP may also be an attempt to make it easier for global users to understand the connection between this APP and the Qwen model.

AI Assistant Battle Royale

In this wave of AI large model frenzy, Alibaba's launch of its first AI-native application is actually not late; it launched the Tongyi Qianwen APP two years ago. At that time, among internet giants, only Baidu and ByteDance had officially launched AI-native applications, while Tencent only launched Yuanbao in May last year, and DeepSeek also emerged earlier this year The performance of the Tongyi Qianwen APP since its launch has been lukewarm, and the monthly active user situation shows a significant gap compared to leading applications in the market.

According to QuestMobile data, the current landscape of AI-native apps is relatively stable. In September, Doubao surpassed DeepSeek, with monthly active user numbers of 172 million and 145 million respectively. Tencent Yuanbao ranked third with 32.86 million monthly active users, while the Tongyi Qianwen APP ranked tenth with 3.06 million monthly active users.

In contrast to the Tongyi Qianwen APP, Quark was actually the product that Alibaba hoped to develop into a super entry point for the AI era. In March of this year, Quark was upgraded to become Alibaba's flagship AI application, becoming a key product for Alibaba's "AI to C" strategy.

According to Wall Street News, with the enhancement of AI capabilities, Alibaba believes that a conversational AI assistant is a better form. In the future, Alibaba will focus on developing the Qianwen APP and integrate it into Quark.

Quark's product positioning is AI search and AI browser, similar to Taotian, 1688, Amap, and overseas e-commerce, all of which belong to the AI transformation of their original businesses; while the Qianwen APP is currently Alibaba's only native AI application.

The Qianwen APP, like Quark, belongs to Alibaba's Intelligent Information Business Group, which is led by Wu Jia, the president of the group.

The Qianwen team has revealed that the company has been making relevant preparations in terms of product and algorithm for the Qianwen APP. By the summer of 2025, discussions among Alibaba's core management will increase, with the period before National Day being the most intensive time for discussions about the Qianwen project.

Ultimately, it was Eric Wu who made the judgment and decision that Alibaba must have a native AI super entry point for the C-end.

Alibaba's management believes that the development of AI will go through three stages: "learning from humans," "assisting humans," and "surpassing humans." Currently, the capabilities of large models have entered the "assisting humans" Agentic AI era, and the timing for Alibaba to enter the C-end market is ripe.

Alibaba's investment in AI-native applications is significant. It is reported that after September, Alibaba has reassigned over a hundred core engineers internally, designating two floors of office buildings at its Hangzhou headquarters as the exclusive base for the "Qianwen" project.

However, Alibaba faces not only several strong competitors but also an increasingly challenging industry situation.

QuestMobile data shows that by March 2025, DeepSeek topped the list with 194 million monthly active users, followed closely by Doubao and Yuanbao, with monthly active users of 116 million and 41.64 million respectively. Notably, by September, there was no significant increase in the monthly active user data of leading AI-native applications.

Additionally, as of September 2025, the overall scale of mobile AI-native apps, In-APP AI, and smartphone manufacturers' AI assistants were 287 million, 706 million, and 535 million respectively, with compound growth rates of 3.4%, 9.3%, and 1.2% in the third quarter, indicating a clear growth bottleneck In the current competition among giants in the "general platform," some AI-native applications in niche sectors have performed well, with AQ, Xiao Yunque, and Xinghui achieving compound growth rates of 83.4%, 90.8%, and 33.3% respectively in the third quarter.

For many years, Alibaba has been questioned about its ability to create blockbuster products for the consumer end outside of e-commerce, with the consumer traffic entry almost entirely occupied by WeChat and Douyin. With the opportunities presented by AI large models, Alibaba has rekindled its ambitions for the consumer end, welcoming another chance to break through itself. However, with the general AI assistant as its spear, the Qianwen APP still faces significant challenges in becoming a super AI application