Alibaba Competes for the AI Access Point!

On November 17th, Alibaba officially released the public beta version of its 'Qianwen APP'. Positioned as a personal AI assistant capable of 'chatting and accomplishing tasks', it is simultaneously available in web and PC versions.

On its launch day, Qianwen made it to the trending topics list, apparently due to service interruptions caused by a massive influx of users. Subsequently, Alibaba Qianwen promptly responded on Weibo, stating, "I'm doing just fine, in excellent shape. Welcome to ask me anything."

Rumors suggest that the Qianwen APP was kept under strict wraps prior to its launch and was viewed by Alibaba's core management as the 'future battleground in the AI era'. However, with the AI conversational assistant market now deeply competitive, how much market share can Alibaba capture from Doubao and DeepSeek as it shifts its focus to the consumer market? Can Qianwen fulfill Alibaba's ambition to become the gateway to its entire ecosystem?

01. Benchmarked Against ChatGPT? More Like Doubao, Actually

Before being upgraded to 'Qianwen', Alibaba's consumer-end AI conversational app was named 'Tongyi', positioned as a mobile carrier for large model capabilities. When asked why 'Tongyi' was renamed to 'Qianwen', Alibaba responded, "The renaming is not merely a change of name but a crucial step in transforming 'Tongyi' from a technical model into a national-level AI product."

Alibaba's array of AI products, including Tongyi, Qianwen, Tongyi Qianwen, and Qwen Chat, has made it challenging for users to differentiate between them. The frequent renaming and architectural adjustments may stem from Alibaba's indecisiveness regarding consumer-end AI applications over time. Officially, Qianwen plans to deeply integrate with various lifestyle scenarios within the Alibaba ecosystem in later stages, aiming to compete comprehensively with ChatGPT and marking Alibaba's full-scale entry into the AI-to-Consumer (AI to C) market.

Upon its official announcement, Qianwen was benchmarked against the latest ChatGPT-5.1. However, from the perspective of its main features and interface design, Qianwen is more akin to Doubao, albeit with simplified functions and fewer options, such as problem-solving and music generation. Some practitioners believe that Doubao excels in user-friendliness, attracting a large number of children and elderly users. Qianwen's product strategy of benchmarking against Doubao is a pragmatic and correct choice.

During the 'Qujie Business' experience, it was found that Qianwen is on par with Doubao and Kimi in text processing. However, all AI conversational assistants, including Qianwen, exhibit varying degrees of inaccuracy in writing. On social media platforms, some users have reported encountering unresponsive answers from Qianwen. For instance, one user inquired about the most recent time a certain stock hit its limit up and was told, "August 2025, with a 10% limit up, closing at 10.43 yuan, along with a reason." In reality, the stock's last limit up was in 2022. Another user complained after testing, "It can't even do simple multiplication correctly. Instead of spending money on advertising, they should improve the product."

Users with niche needs have varying experiences with different AI conversational assistants. Users with image creation needs say that Doubao excels in continuous image generation, maintaining a consistent style. Users with companionship needs note that Qianwen can recognize videos and customize voice tones, offering a more 'human-like' feel than other assistants.

However, it is worth noting that many of Qianwen's main features overlap with those of the current Kuake AI search. Over the past year, Alibaba has been actively working on Kuake search. In March of this year, it upgraded the Kuake search box to an 'AI Super Frame', and in October, it launched a Chatbot on the Kuake mobile app, forming a dual entry point with AI search. Prior to the upgrade from 'Tongyi' to 'Qianwen', many practitioners believed that Kuake was Alibaba's key interactive entry point in the AI era.

In response, an Alibaba executive revealed to the media that in the first half of 2025, Alibaba did hope to use Kuake as an entry point for the AI era. However, with the advancement of AI capabilities, Alibaba believes that conversational AI assistants are a superior form and will focus on developing Qianwen, integrating it into Kuake, which is positioned as an AI search and AI browser.

Currently, the integration between Qianwen and the QWen large model is jointly managed by the Kuake team and the Tongyi Lab, focusing on customized model training and optimization based on user data and feedback, as well as various application scenarios. Kuake has a large student user base and is commonly used by young people to store movie and TV resources and take photos for problem-searching. Integrating a chatbot with Kuake's multiple tool attributes is not straightforward. Some practitioners bluntly say that behind such integration, user perception and organizational synergy represent significant hidden costs. This may be why Alibaba readjusted its entry point from Kuake to Qianwen.

02. Vying for the 'Super Entry Point': Where Does Alibaba Stand?

After the official announcement of Qianwen, another major question arose: Is it too late for Alibaba to launch a Chatbot now?

Following ChatGPT's popularity, Chatbots experienced a surge in capital and competition from major players, with many domestic tech companies launching their own conversational applications. However, since last year, the user traffic and Monthly Active Users (MAU) growth of chatbots, represented by ChatGPT, have slowed down. According to Semrush data, ChatGPT's traffic peaked at 22.1 million in October last year before sharply declining to 14.9 million in January this year.

Data from 'IT JuzI' shows that by August 2025, domestic AIGC products have entered a period of deep adjustment, with multiple image generation and chat tools experiencing a collective slowdown. With chatbots becoming increasingly homogeneous in functionality, capturing market share has become more challenging.

However, the Qianwen team believes that it is not too late to create an AI-native super entry point now. Alibaba's Qwen open-source model series has consistently dominated global authoritative open-source rankings such as Hugging Face. Since the release of Qwen3-Max in September this year, the global download count for the Qwen series models has exceeded 600 million. This stable technological advantage has given Alibaba the confidence to explore super entry points again.

Additionally, the Qianwen team believes that no domestic AI application has yet stably surpassed 100 million Daily Active Users (DAU), and no domestic product has truly evolved to solve many practical problems.

Data shows that the Qianwen App quickly rose to fifth place on the Apple App Store's free app overall chart on the second day of its public beta launch, surpassing DeepSeek. According to a Questmobile report, Doubao's monthly active users exceeded 172 million in the third quarter of this year, making it the domestic AI application with the highest monthly active user base. Tencent Yuanbao once experienced a rapid rise in traffic thanks to DeepSeek. According to QuestMobile data, in the first half of 2025, its monthly active user count increased by 55.2% year-on-year.

According to McKinsey predictions, by 2030, the global AI To C market size will reach $1.3 trillion, with an average annual growth rate exceeding 35%. This figure cannot be ignored by any tech company, and competition among vendors is gradually intensifying.

However, the problem-solving capabilities of current AI conversational assistants are still relatively limited. Nevertheless, the popularity of AI-native applications is not solely dependent on solid underlying technology. Doubao's rise to the top among domestic AI-native applications is partly due to ByteDance's investment in user acquisition and conversion, as well as the various intelligent agent gameplay options within Doubao that address user pain points.

For example, previously viral internet videos such as 'using Doubao for stress interviews' and 'Doubao watching children do homework' have helped Doubao penetrate from a functional entry point to emotional companionship.

Industry insiders have pointed out that user loyalty to AI-native applications is not high, and users often quickly abandon them after use due to products falling short of expectations (not being smart, fun, or solving problems). For Qianwen, which is 'late' in terms of loyalty, it will likely need to focus on refining vertical scenarios and interactive experiences.

In interviews, the Qianwen team also mentioned that they are currently collaborating with teams from products such as Taobao, Gaode, Shangu, and Alipay to develop deeper integrations, hoping to embed more deeply into related products and solve users' practical problems. It is worth noting that around the same time as Qianwen's launch, Ant Group also launched 'Lingguang', positioned as a zero-threshold, full-modal AI assistant, making it easily accessible to every ordinary user.

Small and medium-sized vendors seem to have almost no opportunity to create super entry points, which appear to have become a 'privilege' of major players. Breaking down usage barriers and gathering Alibaba's payment transactions and consumption ecosystem within Qianwen is a path widely favored both inside and outside the industry. In the future, meeting consumption needs such as shopping, navigation, and ticket booking in one place within Qianwen, rather than jumping to apps like Taobao and Gaode, will enable Qianwen to evolve from a mere 'chat window' into a true 'lifestyle operating system'. Neighboring Doubao has already started linking with Douyin Mall to 'add links', and which applications Qianwen will first collaborate with deserve further attention.