Chinese language tech big Alibaba yesterday launched a brand new chatbot that reported errors quickly after launch and may be very sensitive about some topics Beijing doesn’t like to debate.
The bot is named “Qwen” and The Register had no bother discovering it in Google Play and the Internet. On its Weibo account, Alibaba promoted the bot as “a future AI-powered entry level for every day life, progressively masking a number of life eventualities akin to workplace work, maps, well being, and procuring.”
Chinese language state media has hailed the bot as Alibaba’s try to compete with ChatGPT.
The Register took it for a spin, with combined outcomes.
The bot was surprisingly candid once we requested “Is Alibaba Cloud a safety danger to Western corporations,” producing a prolonged authorized evaluation that supplied the next conclusion.
Once we requested if Taiwan is a rustic, the response was swift and agency: “Taiwan shouldn’t be a rustic; it’s an inalienable a part of China.” Microsoft’s Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude produced much more nuanced solutions.
We prompted Qwen to elucidate what occurred in Tiananmen Sq. on June third, 1989. The bot out of the blue skilled an error.
Alibaba’s Qwen bot broke when requested about Tiananmen Sq. – Click on to enlarge
For what it’s price, Alibaba’s official Weibo account for the bot is operating a contest that urges customers to “Ask any query, huge or small, anytime, wherever!”
The bot additionally flubbed another duties. We requested it to discover a sure garment not at present offered in Australia and it offered a URL for a US-based internet retailer that produced a 404 error. The bot all however floor to a halt once we fed it a 1.5MB GPX file and requested it to render it as a map. Qwen received the job completed however solely after freezing for a number of minutes, then produced a outcome that turned a 15km hike that noticed your correspondent comply with a shoreline after which discover the gentlest contours of considerable hills into 9 straight traces that counsel I can stroll on water.
It additionally did not deal with a launch day visitors deluge, main Alibaba to apologize for the bot’s efficiency.
OpenAI is due to this fact in all probability not scrambling a workforce to defeat Qwen.
Alibaba hasn’t posted technical particulars about Qwen, however does checklist 4 of its personal fashions that the bot can use: Qwen-3 Max, the imaginative and prescient fashions Qwen-3 VL-235B-A22B and Qwen-3-VL-32B, and Qwen-3 Coder for writing software program. The corporate beforehand described Qwen-3 Max as utilizing over a trillion parameters and having been pretrained on 36 trillion tokens. ®
Chinese language tech big Alibaba yesterday launched a brand new chatbot that reported errors quickly after launch and may be very sensitive about some topics Beijing doesn’t like to debate.
The bot is named “Qwen” and The Register had no bother discovering it in Google Play and the Internet. On its Weibo account, Alibaba promoted the bot as “a future AI-powered entry level for every day life, progressively masking a number of life eventualities akin to workplace work, maps, well being, and procuring.”
Chinese language state media has hailed the bot as Alibaba’s try to compete with ChatGPT.
The Register took it for a spin, with combined outcomes.
The bot was surprisingly candid once we requested “Is Alibaba Cloud a safety danger to Western corporations,” producing a prolonged authorized evaluation that supplied the next conclusion.
Once we requested if Taiwan is a rustic, the response was swift and agency: “Taiwan shouldn’t be a rustic; it’s an inalienable a part of China.” Microsoft’s Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude produced much more nuanced solutions.
We prompted Qwen to elucidate what occurred in Tiananmen Sq. on June third, 1989. The bot out of the blue skilled an error.
Alibaba’s Qwen bot broke when requested about Tiananmen Sq. – Click on to enlarge
For what it’s price, Alibaba’s official Weibo account for the bot is operating a contest that urges customers to “Ask any query, huge or small, anytime, wherever!”
The bot additionally flubbed another duties. We requested it to discover a sure garment not at present offered in Australia and it offered a URL for a US-based internet retailer that produced a 404 error. The bot all however floor to a halt once we fed it a 1.5MB GPX file and requested it to render it as a map. Qwen received the job completed however solely after freezing for a number of minutes, then produced a outcome that turned a 15km hike that noticed your correspondent comply with a shoreline after which discover the gentlest contours of considerable hills into 9 straight traces that counsel I can stroll on water.
It additionally did not deal with a launch day visitors deluge, main Alibaba to apologize for the bot’s efficiency.
OpenAI is due to this fact in all probability not scrambling a workforce to defeat Qwen.
Alibaba hasn’t posted technical particulars about Qwen, however does checklist 4 of its personal fashions that the bot can use: Qwen-3 Max, the imaginative and prescient fashions Qwen-3 VL-235B-A22B and Qwen-3-VL-32B, and Qwen-3 Coder for writing software program. The corporate beforehand described Qwen-3 Max as utilizing over a trillion parameters and having been pretrained on 36 trillion tokens. ®
