Starting with the Lunar New Year holiday, analysts said China's generative artificial intelligence (AI) market has been reshaped into a duopoly dominated by Alibaba and ByteDance Ltd. Alibaba's Qwen (Chinese name Qianwen) has chased ByteDance Ltd.'s leading large language model (LLM) Doubao to the brink just over 80 days after its launch, ending the Warring States era of AI and ushering in a "two-strong" era for Alibaba and ByteDance Ltd.
According to Chinese tech outlet 36kr on the 19th, Alibaba's Qwen recorded 73.52 million daily active users (DAU) earlier this month. In just 82 days after launch, it drew close to the record ByteDance Ltd.'s Doubao built up over 1,000 days (78.71 million DAU). In particular, right after Alibaba began a "cash giveaway" marketing campaign worth 3 billion yuan (about 630.6 billion won) on the 6th ahead of Lunar New Year, Qwen's DAU surged from under 10 million and grew explosively.
Alibaba and ByteDance Ltd.'s generative AI services are digging into different areas. Qwen first bills itself as "lifestyle AI." It integrates the e-commerce and logistics ecosystem within Alibaba Group to link Qwen with the company's real-life services such as shopping, payments, maps, mobility, and travel, allowing AI to place orders and make payments directly. According to 36kr, during the Lunar New Year period, AI-driven orders exceeded 300 per second, and users reached 800 million.
Doubao, by contrast, is strengthening its role as a "content creation tool." On the 12th, it unveiled Seedance 2.0, an AI model that creates high-definition videos in one minute when text and images are entered, sparking a "Seedance shock." On the 13th, it released Seedream 5.0 Lite, an image generation model. Doubao's image and video generation models aim to reduce content production expense for individual creators and corporations. It also seeks synergy with Douyin, the leading Chinese social media (SNS) service operated by ByteDance Ltd.
In a landscape where many major Chinese IT companies have jumped into the AI race, Alibaba and ByteDance Ltd. have secured their duopoly on the back of their massive user ecosystems. Alibaba's payments platform Alipay has 1 billion users, its shopping platform Taobao has 800 million, and ByteDance Ltd.'s Douyin has 700 million.
Local outlets analyzed that the decisive factor in China's future AI model competition will be the frequency of service use. They said Qwen's explosive short-term growth was driven not only by the "cash giveaway" campaign but also by pulling users' AI experiences into actual consumption beyond simple conversations, meaning the services must become indispensable daily tools rather than ad hoc tools used only when needed.
36kr said, "China's AI market has entered a phase of creating real value," and added, "The key to this competition is not who posts more DAUs, but who penetrates deeper into users' daily lives to become an 'inseparable AI.'"