AI: Global Quest for the AI Assistant 'Super-App'. RTZ #689
We’ve talked about how China’s tech companies are more than giving its US counterparts a run for their money in AI Tech innovation. From home-grown startups like DeepSeek (open source LLM AI & AI Reasoning), to Manus (AI Agents). And state of the art LLM AI products from China big tech companies like Alibaba, Baidu and many others. With the Xi government now leaning into supporting China Tech again, in the teeth of stringent US AI tech curbs and tariffs in this AI Tech Wave.
Their pace of AI innovation is as important to watch as the progress here in the ‘AI Space Race’.
And the most interesting new entry may be a new product from Alibaba, even giving tech giant Bytedance a run for their money.
As the South China Morning Post explains in “Alibaba’s Quark surpasses ByteDance’s Doubao, DeepSeek as China’s top AI app”:
“Quark’s rapid ascent comes as Alibaba has transformed the app from a cloud storage and search service into an ‘AI super assistant.”
“Alibaba Group Holding’s revamped artificial intelligence (AI) assistant app, Quark, which offers a user-friendly interface, has surpassed ByteDance’s Doubao to become China’s most popular AI app in March, showing its appeal among local users.”
“Quark ranked at the top among Chinese AI apps with nearly 150 million monthly active users (MAUs) worldwide, followed by ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek, which had almost 100 million and around 77 million users, respectively, according to Aicpb.com, which tracks the popularity of AI products.”
Quark leverages global sites as a start.
“The website aggregates data from Apple and Google’s app stores around the world, as well as Chinese Android stores, but excludes direct visits to the chatbots’ websites. Alibaba previously said that Quark, available as both mobile and desktop apps, had a total of 200 million users, although it has not specified the user numbers for each platform.”
“A separate report released in early March by US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz ranked Quark as the sixth-most popular AI app globally by MAU, just behind Baidu’s AI Search and trailing OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s AI-enhanced Edge browser.”
The goal is a new category, an ‘AI super assistant app”:
“Quark’s rapid ascent comes as Alibaba has transformed the app from a cloud storage and search service into what it calls an “AI super assistant app”. Alibaba last month unveiled the revamped Quark, powered by the company’s Qwen reasoning models – AI models designed to “think” before responding to queries, making them suitable for complex tasks.”
“The app features a simple search box. Alibaba said it could help with tasks such as academic research, document drafting, image generation, presentations, medical diagnostics, travel planning, text and image generation and coding.”
“Quark’s wide range of AI capabilities reflects a broader trend among Chinese tech firms to enhance their chatbots with diverse features, transforming them into so-called AI super apps to attract users amid growing market competition.”
“In an effort to replicate the success of its flagship app Douyin, the Chinese counterpart of TikTok, ByteDance has been swiftly adding features to Doubao. The app can now search the internet for information and generate text, images and code. The company is reportedly testing video-generation capabilities on Doubao.”
“Meanwhile, Tencent Holdings has enhanced its Yuanbao chatbot with a gallery featuring various AI agents – programs that autonomously perform tasks on behalf of users or systems. It has also integrated Yuanbao into WeChat, one of the most widely used apps in China.”
The US of course has its own race for AI powered Search apps, including OpenAI with its ChatGPT and AI Search products, startup Perplexity with its AI Search offerings, and soon an ‘AI browser’ dubbed ‘Comet’, and presumably other offerings by Meta, Google, Elon’s XxAI ‘Grok’, and many others.
But the broader quest for them all is an AI powered ‘Super-App’ that we saw from China quite some time ago, WeChat.
China led in ‘super-apps’ like Tencent’s WeChat within China over the last two plus decades. It’s something that US companies like Meta, Google, and Elon Musk’s X have aspired to for a long time, with ther own versions for the US market. I’ve even outlined how Apple’s iPhone is the closest to a US ‘Super-App’ device a la WeChat.
And now the global race is on for AI powered ‘Super-Apps’ in this AI Tech Wave. And China is definitely in this race again. Stay tuned.
(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)
