Alibaba's Quark: AI model for chat, images and videos from China
Quark is Alibaba's comprehensive AI assistant. It is said to be more popular in China than ByteDance's Doubao and Deepseek.
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According to Alibaba, Quark is the most popular AI assistant in China. The insight comes a few weeks after the Chinese company transformed the service into a “super AI assistant” that can generate images as well as help with research and coding. Quark is based on Alibaba's Qwen models. Previously, the name was a cloud storage service with a search function and not a comprehensive AI app. The app now has the same range of functions as common AI services in Germany.
As reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), Quark has 150 million monthly active users worldwide. ByteDance's AI service Doubao has around 100 million users and DeepSeek has 77 million. The figures are said to be based on the Google and Apple app stores, but do not consider direct access via the respective web services. SCMP belongs to Alibaba.
Major AI competition in China
A study by the US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is also cited. According to this, Quark is the sixth most-used AI assistant on mobile devices. OpenAI's ChatGPT is in first place, followed by Nova AI Chatbot and Microsoft's AI browser functions in Edge, as well as Baidu's Ernie models. The latter have recently become open source. Quark does not play a role in web services, but Deepseek is in second place after ChatGPT – ahead of character.ai and Perplexity.
Meta is preparing to launch Meta AI, the most widely used AI chatbot in the world. 700 million people are said to be active on Meta AI every month. Ultimately, this is also because the AI is integrated into the other services – which is why it is not possible to count the monthly active users of an app. But: Meta AI is not available in China. Apple also does not offer its ChatGPT access on iPhones in China; instead, Alibaba's AI models are also integrated there. Initially, Apple was said to have held talks with Baidu, but Alibaba was awarded the contract.
Competition is fierce within the country. ByteDance has a head start thanks to TikTok. Deepseek even put Silicon Valley under pressure when the very low-cost R1 and V1 models were made freely available.
(emw)
