Alibaba запускает мощный ИИ-агент Tongyi DeepResearch для комплексных исследований English translation: Alibaba launches powerful AI agent Tongyi DeepResearch for comprehensive research

Chinese tech giant Alibaba has unveiled a “leading open-source AI agent” designed for deep research. Its capabilities are comparable to OpenAI’s flagship Deep Research tool.

Tongyi DeepResearch is integrated into the Amap mapping application and the AI-based legal research system Tongyi FaRui.

Users can utilize the deep research mode for planning multi-day trips and locating legal precedents with verified references.

The new service complements Alibaba’s emerging AI initiatives. In the past two weeks, the company launched its first trillion-parameter model, Qwen-3-Max-Preview, as well as a more compact and powerful version, Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B.

According to Alibaba, Tongyi DeepResearch demonstrated «impressive performance» compared to proprietary tools from the U.S., despite having only 30 billion parameters.

It achieved top scores in popular benchmarks, including Humanity’s Last Exam, where it scored 32.9% against OpenAI’s Deep Research’s 26.6%.

Hugging Face manager Aden Yakefu referred to the results as “stunning.” The AI’s code is open, allowing developers worldwide to download and refine it.

Tan Sizhun, a researcher at 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 novel technique to implement a mechanism that reused information generated during training to enhance the model without human intervention.

The 128,000-token context limit was acknowledged by the company as a barrier that still hampers the execution of several research tasks needing longer input data.

After several years away, Jack Ma is once again actively involved in Alibaba. He visits the company’s campuses and substantially influences strategic decisions—ranging from billion-dollar subsidies against JD.com and Meituan to an increased focus on artificial intelligence.

Although 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 seen as a sign of easing pressure from authorities on the tech sector and China’s renewed focus on artificial intelligence as a driver of long-term growth.

Alibaba is focusing on regaining ground in e-commerce and directing hundreds of billions of yuan into AI and cloud technologies. The company has lost its previous market leadership; however, Ma is striving to «make Alibaba great again» and «reinvigorate the old startup spirit,» despite tough competition and increasing governmental oversight.

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

It is worth noting that in the same month, the tech giant launched the “most advanced AI programming tool”—the open-source AI model Qwen3-Coder.