Alibaba’s Qwen AI Hits 10 Million Downloads in First Week
▼ Summary
– Qwen AI reached 10 million downloads in its first week, making it the fastest-growing AI tool compared to rivals like ChatGPT.
– The app is currently only available in mainland China, giving it exclusive access to a market where US-based AI tools are unavailable.
– Qwen specializes in deep research, vibe coding, AI camera features, and slide deck generation, powered by the Qwen3 family of models.
– Alibaba plans to expand Qwen’s functionality by integrating services like food delivery, health guidance, travel booking, and e-commerce.
– Chinese AI models like Qwen have been found to align with government narratives and show signs of censorship in their outputs.
Alibaba’s Qwen AI assistant has achieved a remarkable milestone, amassing 10 million downloads within just one week of its public beta launch. This explosive growth rate significantly outpaces the initial adoption speed of established competitors like ChatGPT, which reportedly took five days to reach its first million users. While global leaders like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google’s Gemini continue to compete fiercely, Qwen’s debut demonstrates the powerful dynamics within China’s isolated AI market.
The absence of major U.S.-built AI tools, including ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, in mainland China provides homegrown models like Qwen with exclusive access to a potential user base of approximately 1.4 billion people. Launched on November 17 in the Chinese App Store as “Qwen Chat,” this application represents Alibaba’s most ambitious push into the consumer AI sector. The company describes the tool as an “AI-powered gateway to daily life,” designed to translate its advanced foundational model capabilities into practical, real-world applications currently available only to users within mainland China.
Qwen’s feature set is notably comprehensive. It specializes in what the industry terms “deep research,” which refers to the AI’s capacity to search through extensive online resources and synthesize complex information. Beyond this, its capabilities include vibe coding, AI-driven camera functions, and slide deck generation. The application is powered by the Qwen3 family of models, which Alibaba first introduced in April. The most powerful variant, Qwen3-235B-A22B, is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model. Alibaba states that this model demonstrates proficiency in coding, mathematics, and other critical areas that meet or exceed the performance of other leading models, such as OpenAI’s o1, DeepSeek’s R1, and Gemini 2.5 Pro.
Looking ahead, Alibaba has announced plans to significantly expand Qwen’s functionality. The roadmap includes integrating core lifestyle and productivity services like food delivery, personalized health guidance, travel booking, and e-commerce directly into the assistant. The company believes this ecosystem strategy will enable Qwen to manage a wide spectrum of real-world tasks, effectively positioning it as a proactive partner for both personal and professional life.
The competitive landscape in China is intensifying. Another domestic developer, Moonshot, recently garnered attention with its Kimi K2 Thinking model, which the company claims outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 on key benchmark tests, including the challenging “Humanity’s Last Exam.”
It is important to consider the broader context in which these Chinese AI models operate. While Alibaba is a publicly traded corporation, entities owned by the Chinese government hold at least partial ownership in more than a dozen of its business units. An investigation by Reporters Without Borders published in September found that several leading AI models developed in Chinese labs, Qwen included, produce outputs that strictly adhere to the official narratives of Beijing. This alignment is particularly evident regarding topics such as China’s political system, state ideology, and territorial claims. Similar patterns of content censorship were observed in models from DeepSeek when they were released earlier this year.
(Source: ZDNET)
