Alibaba's Qwen App Hits 10 Million Users in One Week, Becoming Fastest-Growing AI Application

HANGZHOU, January 24 – Alibaba's AI assistant “Qwen” has surpassed 10 million downloads just one week after its public beta launch, making it the fastest-growing AI application in history—outpacing initial growth rates of ChatGPT, Sora, and DeepSeek.

The explosive adoption stems from the strong technical foundation and open-source influence of Alibaba’s Qwen model series. Since its full open-source release in 2023, Qwen has surpassed competitors such as Llama and DeepSeek to become one of the world's most widely adopted open-source large language models, with cumulative global downloads exceeding 600 million.

The recently released flagship model, Qwen3-Max, now ranks among the top three globally in performance metrics, outperforming leading international counterparts including GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4. The model has also gained traction in Silicon Valley, with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky stating the company “heavily relies on Qwen” for its speed and quality, while NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang noted Qwen’s dominant and growing share in the global open-source model market.

Following this momentum in both open-source and enterprise sectors, Alibaba launched the Qwen App on November 17, quickly capturing the consumer market. Within three days, it entered the top three on Apple’s App Store free chart, and “Qwen Panic” began trending on overseas social media.

Alibaba positions Qwen as a “personal AI assistant that can chat and accomplish tasks,” integrating it deeply with e-commerce, maps, and local services to enhance its Agentic AI capabilities—enabling cross-scenario task execution beyond just understanding and generating content.

Industry observers see the successful beta as only the beginning, anticipating Qwen could evolve into a national-level application supporting China's ambition to lead the global AI competition.