Alibaba’s Quark AI has blasted past ByteDance’s Doubao, racking up nearly 150 million monthly active users worldwide. The app now sits comfortably as the sixth most popular AI application globally, leaving competitors Doubao and DeepSeek in the dust with their mere 100 million and 77 million users respectively. Not bad for what used to be just a cloud storage service.
Quark’s transformation into an “AI super assistant” is no accident. The app leverages Gwen reasoning models to handle everything from coding to image generation. Need a presentation? Medical diagnosis? Travel plans? Quark’s got you covered. It’s like having a personal assistant who never sleeps or complains about overtime.
Quark doesn’t sleep, complain, or take vacations—it just solves your problems while you’re busy living life.
The Chinese market has embraced Quark with open arms. Apple users in China get Quark instead of ChatGPT. Lucky them? Maybe. The integration with Alibaba’s existing services certainly doesn’t hurt its popularity. When you’re already using Alibaba for shopping, why not let them handle your AI needs too? Alibaba released an enhanced version of Quark in March with the powerful QwQ-32B reasoning model to further bolster its capabilities.
Meanwhile, the global AI landscape looks quite different. Meta AI dominates internationally but can’t even set foot in China. Baidu recently opened its AI models to the public while Microsoft’s Edge keeps pushing its AI features on unsuspecting users. The competition is fierce, and everyone’s fighting for screen time. With job disruption expected to impact 300 million positions globally by 2030, AI platforms are racing to establish dominance.
What sets Quark apart is its all-in-one approach. Rather than specializing in one thing, it’s becoming the Swiss Army knife of AI apps. Text generation? Check. Image creation? Done. Academic research assistance? No problem. This “super app” strategy is catching on, though balancing versatility with usability remains tricky.
The future looks bright but challenging for Quark. Regulatory hurdles loom large, and keeping 150 million users happy isn’t easy. Still, Alibaba’s massive infrastructure gives Quark advantages that smaller players can only dream about. Quark has reported a total of 200 million users across all its platforms, showcasing its impressive reach and growth potential. The AI wars are just getting started, and Quark is armed to the teeth.
