Qwen manages nearly 200 million AI orders during Spring Festival

Qwen helps a user plan a car trip from Hangzhou to Changsha. [Photo/Hangzhou Daily]

During this year's Spring Festival, Hangzhou's AI sector achieved breakthroughs in both technological development and real-world applications.

On Feb 16, Alibaba Group open-sourced its latest proprietary large model, Qwen3.5-Plus, claiming the top spot among global open-source models.

Over the holiday, users nationwide placed nearly 200 million orders via the "Qwen Help Me" one-sentence ordering function — meaning roughly one in every 10 people in China tried the AI-powered service.

According to data released on Feb 23, users ordered 55 million cups of milk tea, 35.16 million cups of fruit teas and 11.38 million cups of coffee through Qwen during the holiday. More than 3,000 metric tons of eggs were also purchased — equivalent to a medium-sized county's annual consumption.

Integrated with platforms across Alibaba's ecosystem, including travel, ticketing and delivery services, Qwen enabled users to complete purchases in just two to three conversational turns — less than half of the typical number used in traditional app-based ordering.

The surge in usage was powered by the release of Qwen3.5-Plus, which adopts an advanced sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture. The model also marks a shift from pure text capability to native multimodal intelligence, trained from the outset on combined text and visual data. It can interpret images, generate code from sketches and perform complex digital tasks.

Since 2023, Alibaba has open-sourced more than 400 models, with the Qwen series surpassing 1 billion downloads worldwide and spawning over 200,000 derivative models.

The launch of Qwen3.5-Plus further strengthens Hangzhou's leadership in the global open-source AI ecosystem and showcases the city's growing role in shaping the future of intelligent technology.

The large language model series of Qwen. [Photo/Hangzhou Daily]