Alibaba said Thursday that it had upgraded its Quark AI assistant with new reasoning capabilities, allowing users to ask complex questions. “The revamped Quark offers advanced c

The new launch is powered by the company’s Qwen AI reasoning model, which the company is pushing to take on OpenAI and its homegrown ( and controversial) rival, DeepSeek. This LLM is also being used by Chinese startup, Manus, for what is being claimed to be “a completely autonomous agent”.

Discover Alibaba's latest AI innovation! New Quark, powered by the Qwen model, offers advanced task execution, chatbot features & more.

The launch comes as its latest effort to gain an edge amid growing competition in AI application front, further intensified by the emergence of DeepSeek.

China's Baidu said on Sunday it has launched two new artificial intelligence models, including a new reasoning-focused model that it said rivalled DeepSeek's model, as it vies to stand out in a fiercely competitive AI race.

Chinese tech company Baidu said on Sunday it has launched two new artificial intelligence (AI) models, which are said to offer the same performance as the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek but at half the cost.