[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Reuters reported on Feb. 16 that Alibaba has unveiled a new artificial intelligence model, Qwen 3.5.
The company said Qwen 3.5 is designed to carry out complex tasks independently and outperformed major competing U.S. models on multiple benchmarks in terms of performance and cost.
Alibaba said Qwen 3.5 is 60 percent cheaper than the previous version and its ability to handle large-scale tasks has improved eightfold. It also offers “visual agent” capabilities that carry out tasks independently on mobile and desktop apps.
Alibaba said, “Built for the era of AI agents, Qwen 3.5 helps developers and businesses do more faster with the same computing resources,” and added that it “sets a new benchmark for performance per unit of inference cost.”
Earlier, ByteDance launched Doubao 2.0 over the weekend. Doubao is currently the chatbot app with the most users in China, with the number of users nearing 200 million. ByteDance, like Alibaba, also promoted its new model as suited to the era of AI agents.
Another Chinese AI company, DeepSeek, is also set to release a next-generation model soon.
Chi-gyu Hwang
delight@d-today.co.kr