The fastest-growing AI application is born! Qianwen App's public beta downloads exceed 10 million in the first week

As of November 24, Alibaba's AI assistant Qianwen App has been in public beta for a week, with downloads exceeding 10 million, surpassing ChatGPT, Sora, and DeepSeek, becoming the fastest-growing AI application to date.

Since its launch on November 17, Qianwen App has been continuously popular, breaking into the top three of the Apple App Store's free overall rankings just two days after its launch. This means that following DeepSeek's launch in early 2025, Alibaba is once again sending a "Chinese AI shockwave" to the world by the end of 2025. Industry insiders view Alibaba's launch of Qianwen App as comparable to the "D-Day" of the AI entry battle.

From the competition of underlying models to the battlefield of super applications, Alibaba has secured the first "ticket" to the AI Agent era. Zheng Hongda, an analyst at Western Securities, believes that in the future, Alibaba may establish a C-end profit closed loop through subscription models, traffic entry, and other business models, driving AI services to reach and convert end users more broadly through models + scenarios.

As of the time of reporting, Alibaba's Hong Kong stock has risen more than 4.6%.

Qianwen App's Popularity Continues to Soar

On November 17, Alibaba officially announced the "Qianwen" project, fully entering the AI to C market.

On that day, the public beta version of Qianwen App was launched, based on the world's top-performing open-source model Qwen3, and combined with various life scenario ecosystems, the fully free Qianwen App is in comprehensive competition with ChatGPT.

On November 18, just one day after its launch, Qianwen App quickly climbed to the fourth position in the Apple App Store's free applications overall ranking, surpassing DeepSeek, and its explosive popularity temporarily caused server congestion. The topic "Alibaba Qianwen crashed" even trended on Weibo on the 18th. The official response, "I'm doing well," humorously confirmed the astonishing traffic that exploded on its first day of public beta.

On November 19, just two days after its public beta launch, Qianwen App's popularity continued to soar, successfully reaching the third position in the Apple App Store's free applications overall ranking.

As of November 24, after a week of public beta, Qianwen App's downloads have exceeded 10 million, surpassing ChatGPT, Sora, and DeepSeek, becoming the fastest-growing AI application to dateNot only that, the user experience of the Qianwen App is also quite outstanding. Some netizens have stated: "Learning and work can be completed in one stop, Qianwen can be regarded as the representative of practicality in AI."

In October, at the global AI investment competition initiated by the American artificial intelligence research institution Nof1.ai, Alibaba's Qianwen won the championship with a profit rate exceeding 20%, surpassing top global models such as Chat GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Grok 4. As a result, investors are highly focused on Qianwen's investment capabilities. It is reported that for a large number of investment questions, Qianwen can provide detailed and professional answers.

In response, Qianwen cautiously stated: "After going live, there have been a large number of user inquiries about investment issues, as well as inquiries about stock trading and following services. Currently, the team has indeed made considerable optimizations in the field of financial investment, which can serve as an investment assistant, but cannot act as a trader. At present, we cannot provide direct stock trading following services. Moreover, investment environments differ, and it is not possible to simply replicate strategies; attention must be paid to investment risks."

A New Wave of AI Impact in China is Coming

The explosive growth in downloads of the Qianwen App stems from the accumulated strength of Alibaba's Qwen model technology and its open-source influence.

Since its full open-source launch in 2023, the Alibaba Qwen model has successfully surpassed competitors such as Llama and DeepSeek, becoming the strongest performing and most widely applied open-source large model globally. To date, the global cumulative downloads of the Qwen series models have exceeded 600 million, accumulating a high reputation in the industry. Recently, Alibaba released its flagship model Qwen3-Max, which has ranked among the top three globally, surpassing international competitors such as GPT5 and Claude Opus 4.

The Silicon Valley market has also been rapidly captured by the Qwen series models. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky publicly stated that the company is "heavily relying on Qwen" because it is faster and better than OpenAI's models. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang pointed out that Qwen has captured a large share of the global open-source model market and is showing a trend of continuous growth.

With a value growth path driven by open-source, Alibaba has forged top-notch model capabilities globally. Now, based on the top open-source models, it has launched a free super application—the Qianwen App, whose core task is to deeply implement model capabilities at the application end. For Alibaba, this will establish a new product system and establish its voice in the future industrial chain. For the industry, this move opens up a new path for the development of AI applications in China, representing that China's AI strength has entered a new stage of application leadership from technological catch-upFamous investor Zhu Xiaohu from Jinsha River Venture Capital stated: "The model directly determines the starting point of Alibaba's Qianwen App. A smarter domestic AI has emerged, which is the AI product that the Chinese market truly needs."

It is reported that Alibaba's management views Qianwen as "the future battle of the AI era." The capabilities of large models have entered the "Agentic AI era, which assists humans," making it an excellent opportunity for Alibaba to create a consumer-facing AI entry point.

Alibaba has previously stated that the positioning of the Qianwen App is "a personal AI assistant that can chat and get things done." The Qianwen App will be deeply integrated with e-commerce, maps, local life, and other business ecosystems, continuously enhancing its Agentic capabilities—allowing AI not only to understand and generate but also to collaborate across scenarios and directly accomplish tasks.

Industry insiders believe that the public beta explosion of the Qianwen App is just the beginning. As open-source models continue to evolve, Agent capabilities rapidly iterate, and ecosystem integration accelerates, the Qianwen App is expected to become a national-level application in the AI era, carrying the mission of enabling China to win in global top-tier competition.

"If the usage scale of the Qianwen App expands in the future, it will inevitably lead to higher Token calls and ongoing reasoning demands, thereby continuing to drive further expansion of AI computing power and infrastructure investment," said Zheng Hongda.

Source: Shanghai Securities Journal

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