Launched last Thursday, Quark was remade by Alibaba into an all-in-one AI assistant, powered by the company’s Qwen reasoning AI model and designed for general users, following years of service as an online-search and cloud-storage tool. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
“I was quite shocked after trying out Quark,” said Charles Zhao Chaoyang, founder of Chinese internet portal Sohu, in a post on his Weibo account last Friday. “By judging the user’s intention, it automatically deploys different functions to complete the task.”
Zhao said he was quite satisfied with the answers Quark provided on two questions related to cosmology that he posed using its deep-thinking mode.
That function reflects how Alibaba’s advances in foundational AI models would be helpful in upgrading its various businesses and those of its enterprise clients.
It also shows Alibaba’s ambition to be competitive in the emerging market for AI agents, such as Chinese start-up Butterfly Effect’s Manus and OpenAI’s Deep Research. These are programs that are capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system using its available resources.