AI Shopping Boom Overwhelms Alibaba's Qwen

Alibaba's artificial intelligence chatbot, Qwen, is experiencing technical difficulties. The chatbot has temporarily ceased issuing coupons due to an overload of customer requests. This campaign was designed to promote Qwen's shopping assistance capabilities beyond simple question answering.

The initiative is the first phase of a 3-billion-yuan plan to increase Qwen's user base during China's Spring Festival holiday. Since last month, Alibaba has been working to transform Qwen into a comprehensive platform, allowing users to access other apps and complete payments directly within the chatbot.

Despite the promotional goals, the rollout of Qwen's Agentic AI strategy has been hampered by technical issues. Within the first nine hours of the coupon giveaway, an astonishing 10 million orders were placed. The overwhelming volume of attempted orders over the weekend led Qwen to announce on Weibo that it was overloaded and requested users to reduce their activity.

Alibaba has not provided further comment on these technical challenges. The coupons issued are valid until February 28, giving shoppers time to redeem them once the system stabilizes.