Alibaba’s Quark leapfrogs Doubao, DeepSeek to become China’s top AI app

Alibaba Group Holding’s artificial intelligence (AI) application, Quark has now surpassed heavyweights like DeepSeek, and ByteDance’s Doubao to be ranked as the most popular AI app in China for March. The revamped AI app, which now offers a user-friendly interface has gained appeal in the sight of the local Chinese population.

Quark is presently ranked among the top Chinese AI applications with about 150 million monthly active users (MAUs) globally, according to Aicpb.com, a website that tracks the popularity of AI products. According to the site, other AI applications like ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek follow closely, with about 100 million and 77 million active monthly users, respectively.

The website uses aggregated data from Apple and Google app stores all over the world in its research. It also uses the Chinese android stores, but excludes direct visits to the chatbots’ websites. According to a previous statement from Alibaba, Quark, which is available on both mobile and desktop, had a total of 200 million users. While the company quoted this figure, it did not specify the number of users by platform.

Alibaba’s Quark makes a huge jump in March, displacing DeepSeek and Doubou

The rapid rise of Quark is coming after Alibaba announced its decision to transform the app from a cloud storage and search service to what the company called an “AI super assistant app.” According to a report released by United States venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in early March, it ranked Quark as the sixth-most popular AI application globally in terms of MAU. The application trailed behind Baidu’s AI search, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Microsoft’s AI-enhanced Edge browser.

Last month, the company behind the AI app unveiled the revamped Quark, noting that the application was powered by the company’s Gwen reasoning models, the AI models designed to think before they respond to queries, making them very good at complex tasks. The app had a simple search bar, and Alibaba mentioned that it could help with various tasks, including document drafting, academic research, travel planning, text and image generation, coding, medical diagnostics, and presentations.

The wide range of capabilities of Quark also shows a wider trend among Chinese tech firms trying to enhance their chatbots with diverse features that will allow them to carry out different tasks, thereby transforming them into what is called AI super apps to attract users as the market continues to grow with the competition.

In January, DeepSeek started the trend, releasing an AI app that could do everything. The innovation attracted praise from tech leaders inside and outside China, considering the company finished its model with a fraction of the costs of heavyweights like ChatGPT.

Tech companies continue to make moves to level up

To level up and replicate the success it got from the release of its flagship application Douyin, the Chinese company behind TikTok, ByteDance has been adding new features to its AI chatbot Doubou. The app has now been embedded with the ability to perform various tasks, including coding, image generation, text generation, and searching the internet for information. According to reports, the company is currently working on and testing the integration of video-generating capabilities on the application.

Meanwhile, Tencent Holdings has also enhanced its Yuanbao chatbot with a new feature, adding various AI agents – programs that can run autonomous tasks on behalf of the users or systems. The company has also integrated Yunbao into WeChat, one of the widely used applications in China. The feature was branded as the “Red Envelope Assistant,” and allows the AI chatbot to offer a range of functions to its users. Tencent will be looking to leverage the power of the over 1 billion daily active users on WeChat to push its chatbot.

Deepseek, on the other hand, recently unveiled a new reasoning method as the market continues to anticipate the release of its rumored new model. A previous report by Reuters mentioned that a DeepSeek-2, a successor to its R1 might be in the works, with the company likely releasing it by the end of this month. However, DeepSeek has remained tight-lipped, maintaining silence on official public channels, with its customer service account shutting down the rumors with business clients, according to reports. In terms of development, the company has announced it is working on an upgraded V3 model named DeepSeek-V3-0324.

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