Alibaba Group has revamped its Quark search engine as an AI “super assistant” powered by its flagship Qwen reasoning model. Quark had previously relied on a model called QuarkLLM. The new iteration features a chatbot, deep thinking and agentic capability, Alibaba says. The company also debuted R1-Omni, a model it says has emotional intelligence. Included in the flurry of Alibaba news: a strategic partnership with Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, the company behind the new AI agent Manus. The moves are part of a surge of Chinese AI tech coming to market as the country asserts itself in the space.

“The launch is the company’s latest effort to gain an edge amid growing competition on the AI application front, further intensified by the emergence of DeepSeek’s blockbuster R1 model,” CNBC writes of another Chinese AI contender.

The new Quark AI assistant marks the first time Alibaba has used its Qwen foundation model for a consumer product. Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai wrote in a South China Morning Post opinion piece that practical commercial applications are key to the success of artificial intelligence and will keep it attractive to investors and growing in smarts.

The company’s new R1-Omni model — open source and available free on Hugging Face — is in an emerging category of models exhibiting “emotional intelligence,” according to Bloomberg, which says the ability to “recognize and respond to human feelings” has made such AI useful “to help customer service chatbots detect frustration and Tesla Inc. cars to spot drowsy drivers.”

“Alibaba, locked in a price war for customers in China, is asking for no fee and letting everyone make use of its new model,” Bloomberg reports, describing a demo as showing it only “surfacing general emotional descriptors like ‘happy’ or ‘angry,’” but noting that “its purported ability to derive those from visual cues is significant.”

The deal with Butterfly Effect sees Manus gaining an inside track to Alibaba’s Qwen, which should jumpstart the new AI general agent’s learning curve. While Manus is currently available by invitation only, Reuters explains Butterfly Effect “has marketed its product by completing dozens of tasks for users on X for free.”

Alibaba is flying particularly high. The Chinese e-commerce giant posted a more than 200 percent profit increase for Q4, propelled largely by its Alibaba Cloud unit. Last week the company launched its QwQ-32B reasoning model, touting it as competitive with OpenAI o3 despite being much smaller, as well as DeepSeek-R1, which is also relatively compact.