On November 13th, it was reported that Alibaba has secretly launched the "Qianwen" project, creating a personal AI assistant named Qianwen APP based on the strongest model of Qwen, fully benchmarking ChatGPT and joining the top competition of global AI applications. The core management of Alibaba sees it as the "battle of the future in the AI era" and hopes to win the competition by leveraging Qwen's open-source technology advantages.
It is understood that the development of the Qwen big model began three years ago and has now become the world's top ranked open-source big model. The latest Qwen3 Max has surpassed international competitors such as GPT5 and Claude Opus 4 in performance, ranking among the top three in the world. The global download volume of Qwen series models has exceeded 600 million times, sweeping across Silicon Valley. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky publicly stated that the company is heavily reliant on Qwen because it is faster and better than the openAI model. Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun stated that Qwen has already captured the majority of the global open source model market and is continuously expanding its share. Alibaba's self-developed model Qwen is becoming the foundation of Silicon Valley.
This is another important layout of Alibaba's AI strategy after announcing a 380 billion investment in AI infrastructure at the beginning of the year. Previously, Alibaba had been heavily focused on the B-end AI market, providing model API services to various industries through Alibaba Cloud. Based on Qwen's excellent performance and international influence, Alibaba's management believes that the time is ripe to launch the Qianwen C-end battle.
Alibaba has deployed hundreds of engineers to work in secret. In Alibaba's headquarters park in Hangzhou, two floors of office buildings have been designated as exclusive areas for the project. The international version of the Qianwen APP targeting the global market is also being developed simultaneously, leveraging the overseas influence of the Qwen model to directly compete with ChatGPT for overseas users.
