Alibaba launches Qwen, a free AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT
Alibaba just dropped Qwen, its new free AI chatbot, now live as a mobile app and website in public beta.
It's Alibaba's biggest move yet in consumer AI, aiming to be your go-to digital assistant in China's crowded market.
Qwen runs on their latest language model and supports 119 languages, plus it can handle text, images, audio, and video.
What makes Qwen stand out?
Qwen's got a Hybrid Thinking Mode that switches between deep reasoning and quick replies—pretty handy for everything from coding help to math problems.
It handles long conversations (up to 128K tokens) and does well on benchmarks against other chatbots.
Its multimodal skills mean you can throw text, images, audio, or video at it—and it gets it.
How does it fit into the competition?
Qwen is totally free and packed with features like translation and coding support. Since it's developed by Alibaba, it is likely to integrate well with Alibaba's ecosystem, which may be convenient for users of their services.
While ByteDance's Doubao has more users right now (150 million monthly), Qwen's advanced features and easy access make it a real challenger in China's AI scene.