Report: Alibaba to Release Upgraded Qwen 3 AI Model in Late April

Alibaba Group Holding reportedly plans to release an upgraded version of its flagship AI model, Qwen 3, later this month.

The timing of the release could change, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (April 1), citing an unnamed source.

Alibaba did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

The company’s latest release will come at a time when the competition in the field is heating up, according to the Bloomberg report.

Chinese companies have released several low-cost artificial intelligence (AI) services since DeepSeek gained attention with the release of its model that it said was less expensive to develop than those of its American rivals, the report said.

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have also released new AI models in recent weeks, per the report.

Alibaba itself has already released some AI products this year, including a new model in its Qwen 2.5 series last week and a new version of its AI assistant Quark last month, according to the report.

The company said in February that it will spend more on AI in the next three years than it has in the last decade.

Alibaba management said during a Feb. 20 earnings call that the company’s AI investments are based on the primary goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).

“We aim to continue to develop models that extend the boundaries of intelligence,” Eddie Wu, the company’s CEO, said during the earnings call. “Why is that the primary aim? Well, it’s because all of the visible AI application scenarios today that we see around content creation, search and so on and so forth have arisen precisely as a result of the ongoing extension of those boundaries, and we want to keep pushing out those boundaries to create more and more opportunities.

When Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of the new Qwen2.5-Omni-7B on Thursday (March 27), it said this multimodal AI model can process inputs in the form of text, images, audio and video; can generate real-time responses in the form of text and natural speech; and can be deployed on mobile phones and laptops.

Because the model is both compact and multimodal, it can power “agile, cost-effective AI agents,” the company said.

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