At the recent Alibaba financial report meeting, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming announced the first batch of strategic innovation businesses - the "Alibaba Four Dragons": 1688, Xianyu, DingTalk, and Quark.
Compared to the first three, quarks are a relatively unfamiliar existence. In fact, it is the first time it has appeared in Alibaba's financial report and been pushed in front of investors. According to data disclosed in the financial report, in September 2023, quark DAU (daily active users) increased by over 35% year-on-year. Based solely on this data, perhaps quarks are enough to create a memory point for the public in their debut.
What is the concept of a year-on-year increase of over 35% in DAU? Bilibili (hereinafter referred to as "Bilibili") released its third quarter financial report in 2023, with Bilibili's DAU reaching 103 million, a year-on-year increase of 14%. In the words of Chen Rui, Chairman and CEO of Bilibili, the user base is a key advantage of internet products. In the year of "increasing revenue and reducing losses" in 2023, DAU is one of Chen Rui's most important indicators.
Like Bilibili, holding young people and still maintaining double-digit growth in the internet world, will quarks become the next hot selling item in the Alibaba world?
Why quarks?
"Compared to 1688, Xianyu, and DingTalk, previously quark lived almost silently in Alibaba Zoo. It wasn't until the night he was announced as the 'Four Little Dragons' that he was unaware of it beforehand," revealed an internal employee of quark.
As an independent app with a search business as its core, in early 2023, Quark introduced itself as an intelligent content and service platform that goes beyond traditional search, from active information acquisition to cloud storage, learning, healthcare, and other fields. By using intelligent tools, content, and services, it creates and meets user needs.
Public data shows that quark services have millions of users and are highly sought after by young users. Ranked first on the App Store's free app download leaderboard multiple times, it is a cutting-edge application that consistently maintains the top spot on the download leaderboard.
The report "2023 Research on Intelligent Efficiency Applications for Young People" released by third-party data agency QuestMobile shows that with intelligent tools and content products such as cloud storage, scanning, and documents, the Quake App is applied across multiple scenarios and fields in the intelligent efficiency industry graph. The proportion of users from the general student population and the new generation of professionals is the highest, and the usage time of young users ranks first in the industry.
In a post by Zhihu titled "What are young people saying when they say" quarks are so fragrant? ", quarks are categorized as" something that ignites now but will become even hotter in the future. ".
Why does the tech savvy quark suddenly become the "Four Little Dragons" outside of Alibaba's traditional e-commerce business? Observers close to Alibaba believe that the main reason is that it caters to the demand trends of young people and Alibaba's AI driven strategy. Previously, Wu Yongming clarified the selection criteria for strategic innovation businesses: having a sufficiently large market space; Having a unique market positioning; Meets user demand trends and the group's "AI driven" strategy.
How popular quarks are among young people, according to Jiang Shangshang, the head of quark technology, who recently revealed data in a media interview that the user base of the quark platform under the age of 25 accounts for over 50%.
However, while it may seem new, quark is not a newcomer. In 2016, quark was incubated internally by UC Browser, with the aim of creating a minimalist, efficient, and ad free browser; In 2018, it repositioned itself from a browser to an AI based intelligent search engine.
According to Jiang Shangshang, in 2018, he wanted to turn quarks into an intelligent assistant for personal work, study, and life, and tried many advanced intelligent technologies. From now on, quarks began to consciously bring AI into intelligent search at that time. "In 2019, quark attempted a conversational application called 'quark baby', but it was difficult to get started with the intelligent technology at the time. In the end, it was decided to shut down the quark baby," said Jiang.
Behind the scenes of self-developed large models
After becoming the "Four Little Dragons of Alibaba," the last time quark made a name for itself was by releasing a fully stack self-developed quark model with billions of parameters.
There are already many big models running ahead on the market, and within the Alibaba system, there is already the Tongyi Qianwen big model released by Alibaba Cloud. Why does Quark have to start a new journey? "Based on the search business, quark has been researching big models for a long time. Its advantage is that it has its own landing scenario for big model applications, which can be quickly applied to the C-end," an insider of quark told China Business Daily.
Almost simultaneously with the development of the quark model, artificial intelligence technology has gradually been integrated into the product iteration of the quark app. For example, the quark scanning king can mimic human thinking in complex scenes, more accurately recognize, analyze, and extract text, formulas, and images, achieving more perfect scanning effects. The AI natural language search function launched on quark cloud storage can quickly find cloud data such as photos and documents through key information such as fuzzy words and adjectives, further improving search efficiency.
It is understood that the quark model will be prioritized in many scenarios such as general search, healthcare, education and learning, and workplace office. A series of AI native applications will provide comprehensive services for young people's work, study, and life.
Another noteworthy issue is the hallucination rate. During an interview with the media, Jiang Jingshang revealed that the pure model illusion rate of the quark model in science popularization Q&A is 25%, which is relatively leading in China. Due to the high error rate, large model companies are reluctant to mention error rates. In terms of general knowledge, the error rate of the quark large model is below 15%, and in the field of healthcare, the error rate can be reduced to below 5%.
"The advantage of the quark model lies in the fact that universal search has a very complete system for understanding webpage content and user search content, as well as the richness of data that other non search engine manufacturers do not possess.".
However, in the eyes of the outside world, the most imaginative feature of quark's exclusive large model is its ability to quickly land on the C-end and be used by young people first, which can help users improve their work and learning efficiency.
Previously, Zhang Ying, founding management partner of Jingwei Venture Capital, specifically mentioned when discussing AI: "The significance of practical experimentation is always greater than just sitting and talking." On the one hand, everyone is talking about AI, and on the other hand, there are not many people who have truly used AI products. A Morgan Stanley survey of over 2000 people found that 80% of them have not used ChatGPT or Google's Bard.
If quarks can allow AI to penetrate into the lives of young people first and turn the data flywheel first, it may become the next hot selling product in the AI era.