Source: Future Technology

Image Source: Generated by Wujie AI

On November 14, Alibaba's Intelligent Information Business Group announced the official launch of the Quark Large Model. According to the introduction, the Quark Large Model is a multimodal large model based on the Transformer architecture, with all technologies self-developed, and a parameter scale of billions; its application scenarios will include not only basic general search, but also more vertical fields such as medical health, education learning, and workplace office.

From the perspective of its application direction, the launch of the Quark Large Model is in line with the current development trend of "heavy landing" of large models.

Before its launch, the Quark Large Model had already formed a research and development team of hundreds of people and conducted pre-training and fine-tuning in the above-mentioned vertical fields. Officially released data shows that the Quark Large Model is not a "trendy" product, but has the ambition to be at the industry's forefront.

On November 16, in the latest evaluation results of the C-Eval and CMMLU, the Quark Large Model topped the list with average scores of 89 and 77.08 respectively; in domestic professional examination tests, it surpassed GPT-4 in the high school entrance examination, college entrance examination, and postgraduate entrance examination, including in clinical practitioner qualification examinations, computer proficiency examinations, civil service examinations, and teacher qualification examinations, all of which were superior to GPT-4 (with a score of 486 in the clinical practitioner qualification examination, far exceeding the passing score of 360).

If we further consider Alibaba's layout in the AI ecosystem, it becomes clear that the birth of the Quark Large Model has strong strategic significance. The Alibaba Intelligent Information Business Group, along with the position of large models, has been mentioned at a considerable height.

AI Technology Genes

It should be pointed out that the Intelligent Information Business Group belongs to the "1+6+N" of Alibaba, similar to the sequence of companies such as Xianyu and DingTalk within the group.

The Intelligent Information Business Group focuses more on product innovation and technological research and development, which is also one of its internal and external recognitions.

Established in April 2021, the business group is positioned for intelligent innovation in the information service direction, including products such as Quark App, UC Browser, and Shuqi Novel.

In October of the same year, the Intelligent Information Business Group upgraded its organizational structure and established the Quark Business Unit around the Quark App. This move was interpreted by the outside world as a move to strengthen the information service track, and Quark is expected to take on the mission of innovation breakthroughs. Including the launch of the Quark Large Model, the research and development route is also to serve the business strategy of Quark.

With the arrival of the AI era, the user value and commercial value in the information service field are still in the early stages of rapid growth, and Quark has been placed at a higher development priority.

In September of this year, Alibaba Group announced two strategic focuses: "user-first, AI-driven internet platform business" and "AI-driven technology business," increasing strategic investment in businesses such as "technology-driven internet platform business" and "AI-driven technology business."

Wu Yongming's indication of Alibaba's future strategic investment direction clearly places Quark as a part of the AI ecosystem, and the launch of the Quark Large Model is already proof of this.

Why Quark

The current positioning of Quark will determine how the Quark Large Model will be applied.

Going back a few years, Quark, which appeared in people's eyes at that time, was still an extremely simple niche product, focusing on optimizing the user's search experience. Also because of its good user experience, it has attracted a large wave of fans among geeks and app players, and its monthly active users have reached millions.

Later, all of Quark's explorations were based on this foundation, and all the changes have always revolved around Quark's growth.

For Quark, which already had a certain volume at the time, a fork in the road had actually been placed in front of it—a product that focuses on information services must consider the direction of future development. A single functional positioning can win at the moment, but it may not capture a larger market. Quark needs to do addition under restraint, but for such an application that is obsessed with user experience and is primarily a search app, doing addition is not an easy process.

During this time, Quark made some attempts, such as professional search in vertical fields, and the construction of a high-quality content ecosystem in different forms.

But just when people thought Quark was about to move into paid content, it quickly reorganized its business system in combination with user needs and market changes.

In 2021, the Quark Business Unit was established, and according to Wu Jia, the president of Alibaba's Intelligent Information Business Group, Quark has entered a new stage and is moving from a user-friendly search app to an intelligent assistant for personal learning, life, and work.

Previously, Quark had already extended some information services based on its search business, such as the high school entrance examination information service, including health encyclopedia and health selected Q&A in the health information search, and documents covering resumes, PPTs, theses, contracts, forms, and journals. In addition, the more tool-oriented Quark Cloud Drive was also launched in 2019.

Before the concept of "intelligent information" appeared, these services were relatively scattered, but after it was clear that Quark was to be a "smart assistant for personal learning, life, and work," Quark's positioning gradually became clearer.

Still, on the principle of not sacrificing user experience, Quark subsequently made more in-depth optimizations to these services, and in 2022, it launched another tool product, Quark Scan King, filling the user experience gap in scanning scenarios. Also in 2022, Quark App's slogan was officially upgraded from "new generation intelligent search" to "your efficient partner," completing the transformation from a "small and beautiful" app to a new generation of intelligent information product with ecological development.

As these services are more tailored to students and young professionals, Quark has also accumulated a group of users with a younger profile—according to QuestMobile's "2023 Young People's Intelligent Efficiency Application Research" report, Quark App has the highest proportion of users among student and new-generation professional users, and the usage time of young users ranks first in the industry. In addition, among the tens of millions of users of Quark services, users under 25 account for more than half.

All of these together constitute the differentiated user mindset of Quark compared to other similar applications.

Clearly, for an application like Quark that is dedicated to helping users improve efficiency and has a stronger practical nature, the introduction of large models is suitable at this stage and also conforms to the evolutionary law of large models. Quark's development has evolved from a single service to a product matrix form, providing ample footholds for large models.

How Will the Large Model "Upgrade" Quark

When we talk about the transformation of a certain application by a large model, it must be based on the original business foundation of the application.

First and foremost, as a search tool, Quark has accumulated a massive amount of Chinese data over the past few years and is said to have the "most comprehensive Chinese database." One of the three core elements of training a large model is data, and Quark's past accumulation first provides the premise for the large model to better understand, evaluate, and refine the Chinese knowledge system.

In more specific fields, Quark's knowledge content system is also relatively complete.

For example, in the high school entrance examination service, Quark has provided high school entrance examination information services for five consecutive years, with very comprehensive high school entrance examination data from various provinces and cities, as well as rich text, video, and live content for different provinces and students in different score ranges; in terms of health services, Quark has also collaborated with hundreds of academicians, medical experts, and professional associations to establish the Quark Health Encyclopedia, and has cooperated with dozens of leading medical institutions in the industry to establish a health selected Q&A system; as for document services, its content also includes practical essays, job resumes, contract templates, PPT templates, educational teaching, form templates, and research reports, among others. In addition, the more tool-oriented Quark Cloud Drive was also launched in 2019.

More importantly, behind this data and content, there are very rich user scenarios, which is also a bonus for the large model to understand and recognize the real needs of different users in work, study, and life.

To some extent, the blessing of the large model and Quark's technological tradition have been inherited.

AI has been widely used in various services of Quark before, for example, in the high school entrance examination and health services, AI has been used in scenarios such as admission prediction, simulated filling, and screening of cases and drugs; Quark Cloud Drive has also successively launched AI natural language search and player AI subtitle generation functions this year; Quark Scan King has also always relied on AI's contribution to recognition accuracy.

Quark can be said to have been prepared for the coming wave, and once the large model is integrated, the impact on Quark's various functional services can be foreseen to be very significant.

Imagine a scenario where in the use of scanning tools, the user's pain point usually lies in the lack of accuracy in the content recognized by the camera. Although AI has been able to improve accuracy in the recognition of layout, formulas, and handwritten content, such AI often tends to be more mechanical in understanding semantics and context. The strongest ability of the large model lies precisely in cognition, so when the large model is used in scanning scenarios, recognition accuracy can be improved by an order of magnitude.

Similar large model application scenarios can almost match every current service of Quark, bringing about more experiential changes.

Regarding the illusion problem that is generally present in large models at the current stage, Quark has also proposed its own response, establishing a technical system that can distinguish the authenticity of knowledge from content, search, and reasoning, especially in general knowledge, graphic and text knowledge, professional knowledge, reasoning knowledge, and writing enhancement, which is expected to make the content provided by the large model more accurate and professional.

Before bringing about changes for users, Quark actively embraced change and changed itself.

A few days ago, Wu Yongming's prediction at the World Internet Conference was, "In the visible future, a more intelligent next-generation product will enter people's lives, AI assistants will be everywhere, becoming assistants in everyone's work, life, and study." Quark has reached the critical point of moving towards the next generation of search, and the large model will also become the technological foundation that drives Quark to continue innovating its product experience.

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