Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on Thursday released a new version of its Quark application, a comprehensive AI assistant powered by Alibaba's Qwen-based advanced reasoning model.

Quark is the first within Alibaba's general user-facing businesses to fully leverage its proprietary foundation models, marking an important milestone in Alibaba's strategy to integrate AI across its businesses.

The revamped Quark offers advanced capabilities such as AI chatbot, deep thinking, deep research and task execution into an easy user interface. It aims to perform functions ranging from academic research to document drafting, image generation, presentations, medical diagnostics, travel planning and problem solving.

It allows users to ask complex, multi-part questions and responds to follow-ups with more in-depth information on a topic directly within the search engines.

"This upgraded version of Quark is just the beginning. As our model capabilities continue to evolve, we envision Quark as a gateway to endless possibilities where users can explore everything with AI," said Wu Jia, CEO of Quark and vice-president of Alibaba Group.

During its most recent earnings announcement, Alibaba Group shared that the company will increase investment in three core areas of its AI strategy over the next three years, namely infrastructure for AI and cloud computing, development of foundational models and AI-native applications, and AI integration across existing businesses.

"We believe the integration of large AI models has immense potential to enhance search, productivity, content creation and workplace efficiency," said Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, during the company's recent earnings call.

Launched in 2016 as a web browser incubated within Alibaba Group, Quark has become a leading AI-powered information services platform -- with over 200 million users in China.

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