Alibaba establishes new division to accelerate consumer use of Qwen AI models

Qwen Consumer Business Group, a new business unit led by Alibaba Vice President Wu Jia, will oversee the Qwen chatbot app. Quark AI Assistant These include cloud drives, AI hardware products, UC browsers, and online reading platform Shuqi.

The move marked a significant organizational change for Alibaba to drive consumer adoption of AI products after securing a dominant position with an open source model for developers. The department's top priority is to turn the Qwen chatbot into an accessible “super app” that can be used in scenarios such as glasses, computers, and cars. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The changes will combine the former's Intelligent Information and Intelligent Connectivity business groups, with the latter overseeing consumer hardware such as Wu's TmallGenie smart speakers and Alibaba's AI glasses.

The Qwen app, an improved version of Alibaba's previous Tongyi app, was relaunched in November. This is seen as the company's most ambitious foray into the consumer AI market to date, with standalone chatbot apps from foreign AI companies OpenAI, google, human and xAIincluding domestic rivals. part time dance, tencent, Baidu, deep seek and moonshotall competing for users.

Alibaba said its free, multipurpose Qwen, which can answer queries, transcribe audio, generate photos and videos, conduct surveys, and create slide decks, had more than 10 million downloads in its first week of public beta, surpassing the adoption rates of ChatGPT and DeepSeek when they were first released.

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