Redazione RHC : 24 November 2025 19:39
On November 24, Alibaba announced Qwen3Max, which had been in public beta for a week , and had already surpassed 10 million downloads. It was a record that shattered all others.
In a very short time, it had overshadowed ChatGPT, Sora , and even DeepSeek , becoming the fastest-growing AI application ever seen. It was Alibaba’s second China move in 2025 , after DeepSeek had already shaken up the industry earlier this year.
The Chinese giant’s shares rose 4.13% in Hong Kong. No overly pompous official announcements, no flashy livestream events: just numbers that spoke for themselves. And the markets, as usual, aren’t wrong when they sense a change of pace.
It all started on November 17th. Qwen3—the open-source model, the most powerful of the moment—was already ready to integrate with real life: shopping, browsing, bookings. It’s not a chatbot that answers questions, it’s an assistant that does things . And it did it without asking for money or a credit card.
On November 18, just 24 hours after its launch, Qwen3Max was already fourth in the Chinese App Store among free apps, overtaking DeepSeek. But the real news wasn’t the rankings: it was the downed servers. The hashtag ” Alibaba’s Qwen3Max has crashed ” exploded. The official response? A single, dry, and ironic sentence: “I’m fine.” No technical apologies, no promises of a resolution within 24 hours. Just an “I’m fine” that, in effect, screamed: “We’ve been overwhelmed.”
The next day, the 19th, it was already third. No TV ads, no million-dollar partnerships , just a community using, sharing, and above all asking the app to do things. And the app tried to do them, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully—but enough to convince millions of people to keep it on their phones.
According to Guancha.cn, no AI app had ever reached 10 million downloads in so few days. ChatGPT took 40 days to reach the 10 million download mark on the web; its iOS app, launched in just one market, had garnered half a million downloads in a week. ByteDance’s Doubao, despite a multiplatform launch, took months to reach 9 million on iOS. DeepSeek, despite garnering 2.26 million downloads in a week in January 2025, didn’t get off to such a strong start.
There’s more to Qwen than just marketing. The open-source model launched by Alibaba in 2023 has surpassed Llama and DeepSeek among developers, earning a solid reputation. Today, the Qwen series has over 600 million downloads globally. The latest addition, Qwen3-Max, ranks among the top three globally—and in some metrics , even beats GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.
It’s not a phenomenon confined to China. Even Silicon Valley is talking about it. Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb , has publicly stated that his company “relies heavily on Qwen” because it is faster and more accurate than OpenAI’s models. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang added that Qwen is dominating the global open source market , with steady and unwavering growth.
For Alibaba, Qwen3 isn’t just another app. It’s the gateway to the era of agent AI : an intelligence that doesn’t wait for questions, but acts. And it does so with a concrete plan: connecting to e-commerce, maps, and local services. It’s not enough to simply search for a restaurant: the goal is to book a table, choose the wine, and maybe even call a taxi home.
This is the real game-changer. It’s no longer “ask and it shall be given,” but “say and it shall be done.” Alibaba explicitly calls it a “personal assistant capable of completing projects.” The focus is on agent AI—a system that understands, plans, and executes. And it does so through complex scenarios: not just text, but also interconnected actions across e-commerce, logistics, and services.
Integration with the Alibaba ecosystem isn’t optional; it’s core. The app will need to communicate with Taobao, AutoNavi, and Ele.me. The goal? To ensure that AI isn’t just a toy for tech enthusiasts, but is embedded in the very fabric of the real economy: deliveries, transactions, customer service, fleet management, and reservations. Almost everything is automated.
Analysts see it clearly. Zheng Hongda of Western Securities talks about an upcoming monetization cycle, based on subscriptions and targeted traffic. Dongfang Securities goes further: Qwen will not only strengthen Alibaba’s leadership in AI, but will also fuel the group’s other services —user sharing, cross-promotion, and faster revenue. It’s not just an app: it’s a system engine.
AI is no longer a luxury of the future. With Qwen, Alibaba is transforming it into an everyday work tool . You no longer need an engineer to use an advanced model: all you need is a phone and a simple request. ” Organize a dinner for me on Friday with colleagues, budget 300 yuan, near the office, with a vegetarian option.” The app tries. Sometimes it succeeds. And when it works, everything changes.
This is the new paradigm: no longer AI as a specialized resource, but as invisible infrastructure. Like electricity . Like Wi-Fi. Something that’s there, that works, and that allows you to do more, faster, with less effort. Alibaba isn’t launching a product: it’s building a new operational layer for the digital economy.
And in the end, perhaps, it won’t even be about ” winning ” the global competition. Because if AI truly becomes a basic service—like water and electricity—who controls it doesn’t matter as much as who distributes it, maintains it, and makes it useful every day. And on this terrain, Alibaba is setting up camp.
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