New Quark will be available to all users gradually, starting with a pilot launched Thursday. Its launch came just a day after Alibaba launched an R1-Omni model that said it could read emotions. Both join a flurry of product updates and announcements from Chinese firms after Hangzhou-based DeepSeek stunned Silicon Valley with a model comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but apparently developed at a fraction of the cost.
Alibaba Group unveiled a new version of its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant mobile app that incorporates its latest in-house model, another in a series of product rollouts intended to help the company keep pace with Chinese artificial intelligence rivals.
It re-tooled the Quark app to take advantage of its flagship Qwen reasoning model. “New Quark” now integrates functions including a chatbot, deep thinking and task execution into a one-stop app, the company said in a statement. Based on a web browser Alibaba introduced in 2016, it can handle tasks from image generation to travel planning, similar to what ByteDance Ltd.’s Doubao can offer to users, it said. The company posted a demonstration video that showed the app writing articles from pictures and generating minutes for meetings.
