Having achieved parity with the industry-leading daily active users (DAU) metric in under 100 days and expanded AI accessibility from bustling CBD offices to remote rural areas, Qianwen has emerged as the most talked-about AI application during this Spring Festival. It stands out as one of the few AI tools capable of delivering real-time feedback in short cycles.

Recent data from QuestMobile reveals that Qianwen’s DAU has surged to 73.52 million, significantly outpacing Yuanbao’s 18.28 million and nearing Doubao’s 78.71 million. Furthermore, the Apple App Store’s free app rankings show Qianwen has topped the charts for eight consecutive days. The leading tier of AI applications is no longer fragmented but is increasingly showing a concentrated trend.

Wu Jia, President of Qianwen’s Consumer Business Group, granted an exclusive interview today, discussing Qianwen’s rapid rise to prominence.

He emphasized that Qianwen was never designed to engage in cutthroat competition. Instead, its mission is to seamlessly integrate AI into everyday life scenarios for the general public. “This is an inevitable future trend,” he stated.

Wu expressed confidence that, in this wave of AI innovation, China will emerge as a global leader, with models advancing through healthy competition among companies.

From an internal Alibaba tool to a product now rivaling Doubao in public rankings, Qianwen has achieved remarkable growth without a traditional “warm-up” phase. It has also spurred the entire industry to accelerate, recalibrating market rhythms during the Spring Festival period.

The narrative surrounding AI application deployment—from conceptualization to product launch, from technical parameters to practical scenarios—has been discussed for far too long. The much-anticipated intelligent lifestyle has finally materialized this Spring Festival. Now, with both Qianwen and Doubao surpassing 70 million DAU, China’s large-scale AI app competition is rapidly evolving into a “dual-core” landscape.

AI Dual Dominance: Qianwen Builds Infrastructure, Doubao Leverages Strategic Advantages

The debate over AI application strategies has long persisted, but with Qianwen and Doubao now dividing the market, mature practical directions have emerged: lifestyle as “infrastructure” and production tools as “strategic levers.”

Alibaba’s strategy for Qianwen focuses on deep integration between its “strongest model” and its “most comprehensive ecosystem.” The rationale is straightforward yet precise: a large model’s intelligence serves as the foundational capability, while rich lifestyle services like Taobao, Freshippo, and Amap act as the delivery mechanisms for this intelligence. By bypassing traditional “ability demonstrations”—such as poetry writing and painting—Qianwen directly tackles the most challenging aspect of AI deployment: service delivery.

Wu also clarified Qianwen’s original intention: the “red packet wars” are not about cutthroat competition but about integrating AI into everyday life scenarios. Whether ordering milk tea or buying movie tickets, “this is the first time AI has truly participated in consumers’ real decision-making and execution processes. This isn’t about traffic competition; it’s an inevitable future trend,” he explained.

In the three months since its official beta launch in November, Qianwen has demonstrated clear goals and rapid execution.

A mid-January press conference announced full integration with Alibaba’s ecosystem, declaring that AI would “usher in an era of getting things done.” This was followed by a 3 billion yuan “Spring Festival Hospitality Plan” in February that captured nationwide attention.

Official data reveals that within six days of the “3 billion yuan Spring Festival giveaway,” Qianwen helped users place 120 million orders and received 4.1 billion “Qianwen, help me” requests. This catchphrase even became an internet meme. Two decades after “Baidu it, and you’ll know” became a portal-era catchphrase, people now casually say “Qianwen, help me,” recognizing its versatility.

Using high-frequency “free milk tea” offers as a starting point, Qianwen rapidly expanded AI’s service boundaries from food delivery to movie tickets, flights, and hotels. Once users develop the habit of “conversation as service” and routinely issue instructions to AI, it will naturally become an indispensable part of daily life.

While Alibaba aims to be a “housekeeper” integrated into ordinary life, ByteDance aspires to be an “equipment provider.”

Leveraging its roots in short videos and algorithmic recommendations, ByteDance operates within its comfort zone by strengthening the “production tool” attribute and widening the competitive gap through content generation efficiency.

This month, Doubao 2.0, SeedDance 2.0, and Seedream 5.0 were sequentially released, with SeedDance 2.0 dominating social media discussions. Traditional ad agencies might spend hundreds of thousands to produce a high-quality 15-second TV commercial, but ByteDance aims to enable PUGC (Professional User-Generated Content) creators to mass-produce similar visual content at minimal cost.

When AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from human-made content and costs are drastically reduced, platforms may become unavoidable underlying tool providers for all future digital content creators.

Divergent Paths: Alibaba Engages with the World, ByteDance Transcends It

Both represent milestone efficiency revolutions, yet Alibaba and ByteDance have charted entirely different courses.

For most general-purpose large models, the biggest pain point is “talking but not doing”—they are knowledgeable consultants but ineffective doers. Alibaba’s strength lies precisely in its 20-year effort to build a tangible, “labor-intensive” physical ecosystem empire.

For example, on Taobao/Tmall, a complete shopping process involves searching, price comparison, ordering, and order tracking; on Taobao Freshippo, it includes instant retail and fulfillment services; Alipay handles payment settlement, bill inquiries, and utility payments; Amap covers location searches, route planning, and ride-hailing; while Fliggy manages flights, hotels, and overall travel planning.

Within Alibaba’s major sectors—e-commerce, instant retail, and local services—these specific interaction points have been refined over years, forming closed loops of data, traffic, and services. AI then orchestrates them to deliver complete AI services from demand expression → task execution → payment fulfillment.

Without app switching or repeated comparisons, AI serves as both the entry point and the final executor. This system is difficult to replicate, and even if attempted, it cannot catch up with two decades of accumulated assets.

On one end is ByteDance’s “time-killing” approach, enriching creative content; on the other is Alibaba’s “time-saving” approach, making life more convenient and services smoother.

As the world’s core operator of attention resources, ByteDance understands that recommendation algorithms rely on a constant supply of content, and AI generation is the most efficient content provisioning tool.

PUGC has already significantly lowered content production barriers, enabling Douyin’s initial traffic accumulation. However, video generation has once again disrupted the supply side. When algorithms detect user preference for a specific video style, generation models can respond in milliseconds to mass-produce similar content.

Currently, multiple ByteDance AI tools are deeply embedded in its traffic ecosystem, with creation, consumption, and distribution all reinforced by AI. Unlike Alibaba’s closed loop for real-world transactions, ByteDance achieves a closed loop for content production, consolidating its dominance in the attention economy through tool iteration.

These two efficiency revolutions—one aiming to make life more convenient, the other to simplify creation—stem from differing resource endowments and reflect diverse industry understandings of AI application directions.

Ecosystem Synergy Reflects Alibaba’s 20-Year ‘Superpower’

Beyond differing models, Qianwen’s rapid ascent is particularly noteworthy.

ChatGPT’s late-2022 debut ushered in a new AI era, with Doubao launching in August 2023 and surpassing DeepSeek to become China’s top AI app by monthly active users in August 2025. In contrast, Qianwen reached DAU parity with Doubao in just three months.

Mere technological superiority cannot fully explain this hyper-efficiency. While large model capabilities determine eligibility for top-tier competition, current model performance gaps among vendors are not generational, and parameters/rankings do not directly translate to DAU.

Qianwen’s explosion proves that at the application layer, scenario depth determines AI’s height. For the masses eagerly seeking real-world AI value, the allure of “saving money and effort” obviously generates far greater momentum than “chatting for companionship.”

This resembles how previous internet companies used subsidies to teach users to hail rides or order food via smartphones. Qianwen has transformed prompt-based interactions—originally requiring a technical barrier to entry—into everyday services accessible to all through giveaways.

Dismissing this as mere money-burning for growth misses the point. Experts recognize that AI Agents have achieved large-scale real-world task execution globally for the first time, transforming AI from “screen-bound spectacles” into “pocket-sized services.”

First, it validates scalability—not just small-scale testing but stable operation in tens of millions of user environments. Second, it expands possibilities for AI business models. Subscription fees are not the only solution; transaction commissions and service fees could become new monetization structures.

Recalling Alibaba’s two-decade-old mission to “make doing business easy,” it may sound commercial but essentially addresses human opportunities and dignity. Town youths can open online stores; remote villages can sell produce nationwide—technology serves ordinary people’s aspirations. Qianwen’s “AI for getting things done” follows the same logic: technology exists to make life easier, not force people to adapt to it.

From this perspective, the confidence behind “money power” is actually Alibaba’s 20-year accumulated “superpower”—the ability to understand real users, needs, and experiences.

As Alibaba simplifies life and ByteDance simplifies creation, these giants converge toward a shared direction, shifting industry focus from “whose model is smarter” to “whose model is more useful.”

The dual-dominance pattern signifies that China’s AI has finally moved beyond abstract parameter arms races, entering a brutal yet authentic “application value-driven” phase.

“I firmly believe that in AI applications, China will lead the world,” Wu declared.

*Featured and in-text images sourced from the internet.