China's AI 'throne' changes hands

Quark billboard at Nanning airport, China. Photo: Simon Song/SCMP .

Quark, an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant product developed by Alibaba Group from its search app, has seen a significant increase in popularity. In March, the app surpassed ByteDance's Doubao to become the most widely used AI in China.

According to data from Aicpb.com, a website that tracks the popularity of AI products, Quark has risen to the top spot among Chinese AI applications with nearly 150 million monthly active users (MAUs) globally, followed by ByteDance’s Doubao with nearly 100 million users and DeepSeek with about 77 million users.

Notably, Aicpb.com aggregates data from Apple and Google app stores worldwide, as well as Android app stores in China, but does not include direct visits to chatbots' websites.

Alibaba previously said that the total number of Quark app users, including mobile and desktop versions, reached 200 million. However, the company has not disclosed detailed information about the number of users on each specific platform.

Before being dethroned by Quark, Doubao, owned by TikTok's parent company, held the number one spot with more than 100 million monthly users. Photo: SCMP.

Another report published in early March by US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz ranked Quark as the 6th most popular AI application globally on the MAU scale, behind only Baidu's AI Search and OpenAI's ChatGPT as well as Microsoft's AI-integrated Edge browser.

Quark's rapid growth comes after Alibaba transformed the app from a traditional cloud storage and search service into what it calls an "artificial intelligence super assistant" platform.

In March, Alibaba officially introduced an upgraded version of Quark, which is powered by its own “Qwen” reasoning models, AI models designed to “think” before responding to queries, making them suitable for handling complex tasks.

Alibaba says Quark can support tasks such as academic research, text editing, image creation, presentations, medical diagnosis, travel planning, text and image creation, and programming code writing.

Quark reflects a general trend among Chinese tech companies to develop AI chatbots with diverse features, turning them into "AI super apps" to attract users amid increasing market competition.

In an effort to replicate the success of its flagship app Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), ByteDance has been quick to add features to Doubao. The app can now search for information on the internet and generate text and images. The company is reportedly testing the ability to create videos on Doubao.

Tencent is also improving its Yuanbao chatbot by adding a diverse library of AI agents, which are programs designed to automatically perform tasks at the request of users or systems. In addition, Tencent is integrating Yuanbao into WeChat, one of China's most widely used apps.

Source: https://znews.vn/ngoi-vuong-ai-trung-quoc-doi-chu-post1545622.html