BEIJING, Feb 16 (Reuters) – Alibaba on Monday unveiled a new Qwen 3.5 artificial intelligence model designed to execute complex tasks independently, with major improvements in performance and cost that the Chinese tech giant says beat rival flagship U.S. models on several benchmarks.
The release comes as Alibaba seeks to attract more users to its chatbot app Qwen in China, a landscape currently dominated by rival tech giant ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek, which became the first Chinese AI firm to go global last year.
Alibaba said Qwen3.5 was 60% cheaper to use and eight times better at processing large workloads than its immediate predecessor, adding that the model also came with the ability to take actions independently on mobile and desktop apps, or what the company calls “visual agent capabilities”.
“Built for the agentive AI era, Qwen3.5 is designed to help developers and enterprises move faster and do more with the same computation, setting a new benchmark for capacity per unit of inference cost,” the company said in a statement.
ByteDance on Saturday released Doubao 2.0, an update to its chatbot app that currently commands the largest user base in China, approaching 200 million. The announcement, like Alibaba, also positioned the new model as suitable for the era of the AI agent.
The launch of Qwen3.5 may help further recent gains that Alibaba has made in the cutthroat competition of AI models in China. Earlier this month, the e-commerce giant’s coupon giveaway campaign that encouraged consumers to buy food and drinks directly in the Qwen chatbot led to a sevenfold increase in active users, despite some glitches.
Last year, the e-commerce giant was one of the first of DeepSeek’s competitors to respond to the startup’s viral rise, releasing the Qwen 2.5-Max, which it claimed was superior to one of DeepSeek’s hit models.
The company did not mention DeepSeek in its announcement for Qwen3.5, and the various benchmarks it published only show the new model surpassing a previous iteration and rival US models GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro.
DeepSeek is expected to release its next-generation model in the coming days, fueling anticipation among investors and industry insiders due to the global tech share sale the company launched a year ago.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Sam Holmes)