Alibaba Group Holding has revamped its web-search and cloud-storage tool Quark into a super artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, signalling the tech giant’s efforts to strengthen its foothold in the emerging field of AI agents.
The new version of Quark is powered by Alibaba’s Qwen series reasoning model. It offers advanced capabilities such as a chatbot, as well as deep thinking and task execution features through the “all-in-one AI super assistant”, which can handle tasks ranging from academic research to medical diagnostics, the Hangzhou-based company said on Thursday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Alibaba said this was the first time it had fully leveraged its proprietary foundation models into consumer-facing businesses. The move comes as the race for AI agents is heating up in China, with big tech companies rushing to develop a user base of their own.
AI agents are programmes that are capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system. These agents create a plan of specific tasks and subtasks to complete a goal using its available resources.
