Alibaba запускает инновационного AI-агента для продвинутых исследований Translation: Alibaba launches an innovative AI agent for advanced research

Chinese tech giant Alibaba has unveiled an open-source «leading AI agent» designed for in-depth research, comparable in capabilities to OpenAI’s flagship Deep Research tool.

Tongyi DeepResearch has been integrated into the Amap mapping application and the Tongyi FaRui AI-powered legal research system.

Users can leverage a deep research mode to plan multi-day trips and find legal precedents backed by verified references.

This new service adds to Alibaba’s growing AI initiatives. In the past two weeks, the company launched its first trillion-parameter model, Qwen-3-Max-Preview, along with a more compact and powerful version, Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B.

According to Alibaba, its Tongyi DeepResearch has demonstrated «impressive efficiency» compared to proprietary tools from the US, despite having only 30 billion parameters.

It achieved top scores in popular benchmarks, including Humanity’s Last Exam, where the assistant scored 32.9% compared to 26.6% for OpenAI’s Deep Research.

Hugging Face manager Aden Yakefu called these results «astounding.» The AI code is open, allowing developers worldwide to download and refine it.

Tan Sizhun, a researcher from the Sky Computing Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that Alibaba’s strength lies in its data preparation approach. High-quality synthetic samples were used for training.

The Chinese company employed a new technique involving the reuse of information generated during training to enhance the model without human intervention.

The company acknowledged that the 128,000 token context limit remains a factor hindering the completion of several research tasks that require longer input data.

After several years away, Jack Ma is once again actively engaged in Alibaba’s operations. He is visiting the company’s campuses and significantly influencing strategic decisions — from multi-billion subsidies in competition with JD.com and Meituan to an intensified focus on artificial intelligence.

While Ma does not hold an official position, he acts as an «invisible hand,» demanding regular updates, inspiring employees, critiquing strategies, and boosting morale. His return is perceived as a signal of easing regulatory pressures on the tech sector and a renewed Chinese commitment to artificial intelligence as a driver of long-term growth.

Alibaba is focusing on regaining its footing in the e-commerce sector, directing hundreds of billions of yuan into AI and cloud technologies. The company has lost its previous market leadership, but Ma is striving to «make Alibaba great again» and «revive the old startup spirit,» despite fierce competition and increasing regulatory scrutiny.

In July, Alibaba introduced Quark AI glasses, which offer voice control, real-time translation, and transcription features.

It is worth noting that the tech giant also launched «the most advanced AI programming tool,» an open-source AI model called Qwen3-Coder, in the same month.