Qwen (Alibaba’s AI Assistant) Unveils Wave of Updates: Ecosystem Expansion, Technical Milestones, and New Hardware

Alibaba’s Qwen (formerly Tongyi Qianwen) has been leading AI innovation with a string of updates over recent months, spanning ecosystem growth, user-centric tools, technical breakthroughs, and hardware launches.

In June, Qwen opened its platform to third-party agents and skills, welcoming brands like KFC, Luckin Coffee, Mixue Ice Cream & Tea, and China Eastern Airlines to test services. This move aims to build a robust AI assistant ecosystem. Additionally, Qwen integrated deeply with Taobao, enabling a full AI-powered shopping loop from recommendation to after-sales.

For daily users, Qwen rolled out practical tools: its AI ride-hailing service saw a 1500% week-over-week growth during the Qingming holiday. Students got over 10 million free college application reports and a dedicated Gaokao volunteer application agent. Office users benefited from updated PPT tools (popular among English teachers) and an Excel table agent for dialogue-based editing. A paid office assistant plan was introduced for professionals, per Caixin Media.

Technically, Qwen3.6-Plus ranked second in the Code Arena global coding test, outperforming OpenAI and Google models to become the top Chinese coding model. The Qwen3.5-Omni multimodal model achieved state-of-the-art results in 215 tasks, surpassing Google’s Gemini-3.1 Pro. It also added financial analysis to its "Deep Research" feature and tested the HappyHorse video generation model.

Qwen expanded into hardware with its G1 series AI glasses (launched in March, starting at 1997 yuan). Its August-launched open platform supports mobile, PC, and AI glasses integration. For enterprises, QwenWork (an enterprise agent product) entered public beta in August.

Sources

• Pingwest (https://www.pingwest.com/tag/20711)
• Caixin Media