Alibaba Group (NYSE:BABA) shares climbed sharply in Hong Kong on Tuesday after local media revealed the company is working on a new artificial intelligence initiative designed to compete directly with ByteDance’s AI offerings.
The stock gained as much as 4.2% to HK$169.0, making it one of the top contributors to the Hang Seng Index’s 1.7% advance.
According to a report by Chinese outlet Sina Tech, Alibaba’s Quark unit is spearheading a new conversational AI initiative internally known as “Plan C.” The project is widely viewed as a move to go head-to-head with ByteDance’s chatbot Doubao, one of the fastest-growing AI products in China.
“Plan C” is being built by Quark’s core development team with additional backing from Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab — the company’s main hub for artificial intelligence innovation.
Tongyi is behind Alibaba’s flagship Qwen large language models (LLMs), which have emerged among the most competitive Chinese AI systems on the market. This positions the group in direct competition with ByteDance, another major force in China’s AI landscape through its Doubao platform.