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. Continue reading Alibaba Updates Quark, Debuts R1-Omni, Secures Manus Pact