Alibaba on the counter-attack: stronger Qwen chatbot to challenge Silicon Valley

Alibaba has launched a revamp of itsartificial intelligence chatbot, in line with OpenAI's ChatGpt, the latest challenge to US Silicon Valley giants by the Chinese e-commerce giant founded by Jack Ma.

The new chatbot app, Qwen, an updated and renamed version of the previous Tongyi, has been available on the Android and Apple app stores since Friday.

The Hangzhou-based group presented its latest version as 'the most powerful official Ia assistant for its models' and 'the main entry point for testing the latest and most powerful Qwen model'.

Alibaba has been promoting the adoption and commercialisation of the Qwen artificial intelligence model series for the past two years, in the context of the global frenzy in the industry initiated by OpenAI.

Emerging as one of the leading AI developers in China, along with startups such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, Alibaba has doubled down on its open source approach, making its models available for use, modification and distribution by third-party developers. In the quarter ended June, Alibaba's revenue from artificial intelligence-related products maintained triple-digit year-on-year growth for the eighth quarter in a row.