Alibaba Stock Rises as New AI Model Qwen3-Omni Takes On Google And Microsoft

Sep 23 - Alibaba BABA gained nearly 1% at Tuesday's open after unveiling its latest artificial intelligence model, Qwen3-Omni, an open-source system designed to process text, images, audio, and video in real time.

The company described Qwen3-Omni as the first end-to-end multimodal AI that unifies all four input types without trade-offs. It supports text interaction in 119 languages. Developers can adapt the model using system prompts to adjust style, persona, and behavior, while function-calling support allows smooth integration with external tools and services.

Alibaba also released three specialized versions, Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct, Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Thinking, and Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Captioner, offering capabilities from instruction following to audio captioning. The company said the models achieved state-of-the-art results on 32 of 36 audio and audiovisual benchmarks, surpassing strong closed-source models like Alphabet's GOOGL Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI's GPT-4o, which is backed by Microsoft MSFT.

In contrast to its competitors in the United States, Alibaba released Qwen3-Omni as freeware under the Apache 2.0 license, even commercially. The introduction makes Qwen3-Omni a competitive alternative to Google with its Open-source Gemma 3n and other popular AI platforms.