Alibaba’s Qwen ramps up AI app race with Spring Festival giveaway blitz

Alibaba Group Holding has joined rivals including Tencent Holdings and Baidu in rolling out Spring Festival red-packet giveaways to drive mass-market adoption of its artificial intelligence, committing 3 billion yuan (US$432 million) to spur spending across its ecosystem as it seeks to extend its edge in foundational models to consumer-facing products.The Hangzhou-based e-commerce and AI giant said on Monday that its AI app Qwen would anchor a Spring Festival campaign across its flagship shopping platform Taobao, on-demand retail and food-delivery service Shangou, online travel agency Fliggy, ticketing platform Damai, mapping service Amap and grocery chain Freshippo. Incentives would include lottery-style free orders and cash in red packets.Rather than a conventional chatbot, the Qwen app functions as a personal agent, leveraging Alibaba’s ecosystem to carry out actions directly for users. Alibaba said the campaign was designed to “invite users to experience a new lifestyle in the AI era” and would officially launch on February 6. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.The move follows aggressive campaigns by competitors Tencent and Baidu, which had rolled out cash incentives of 10 billion yuan and 5 billion yuan, respectively, to promote their consumer-facing AI apps, with the Spring Festival long regarded as China’s most high-stakes marketing battleground.The Spring Festival is long regarded as China’s most high-stakes marketing battleground. Photo: Getty ImagesByteDance, owner of Douyin and TikTok, moved even earlier, securing what it described as an “exclusive AI cloud partnership” with national broadcaster China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala, mainland China’s most-watched television broadcast, set for February 16.