Alibaba Group Holding’s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Quark is making waves across Chinese social media on the back of positive reviews, raising its prospects of becoming a “killer app” in this field.

Alibaba’s US-listed shares rose 2.16% in premarket trading.

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.

“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.

Shanghai-based user, Jiang Ying, has made Quark her default AI option after reading a discussion about it on Weibo and testing the app.

“It combines all the AI features that I want within one single app – generating text and images as well as deep thinking,” she said.

Jiang pointed out that she valued the deep-thinking function on AI applications, which made them more “humanlike”. She added that DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot, which she started using in January, was only capable of generating text answers.

Other Quark users indicated that the app’s simple interface, like a traditional search engine, now allows them to easily use AI in their daily life.

Since its launch, Alibaba’s AI assistant app has appeared on Weibo’s trending topics under “Quark AI”, which has become the Chinese microblogging platform’s ninth hottest topic.

Quark, which already had more than 200 million users before it was revamped, provides a huge potential for expanding Alibaba’s reach in the consumer-facing AI market. Alibaba has yet to announce the latest user numbers of Quark post-launch.

“I was a user of the Quark search engine, and everything just became easier after it was equipped with AI,” said Samuel Chen in a Weibo post. Chen said he started using Quark as an online-search tool two years ago.

Alibaba’s Qwen series is already at the forefront of open-source AI models in terms of performance. The company’s latest reasoning model QwQ-32B, which was unveiled earlier this month, has either matched or outperformed DeepSeek’s R1 in areas such as maths, coding and general problem-solving, according to the Qwen team.

“We believe the integration of large AI models has immense potential to enhance search, productivity, content creation and workplace efficiency,” Alibaba chief executive Eddie Wu Yongming said during the company’s earnings call in February.

Quark is also expected to serve as an add-on to enhance the capabilities of Alibaba’s existing computing infrastructure.

Alibaba recently announced plans to invest at least 380 billion yuan (US$52 billion) in cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years. This marks China’s largest-ever computing project financed by a single private business.