Qianwen's Surprise Attack! 6 days, 120 million AI orders placed

Summary:

The Qianwen Campaign Makes the Entire Industry Reflect: What Kind of AI Do People Really Need?

This is perhaps the most surprising figure in this year’s AI Spring Festival box office.

On February 12, the first wave of data from the Qianwen app’s “Spring Festival 3 Billion Free Orders” event was released—over the past six days, users said “Qianwen help me” 4.1 billion times, and AI order placements exceeded 120 million.

Just a day earlier, a screenshot of QuestMobile data was circulating wildly in the industry. On February 7, Qianwen’s daily active users (DAU) reached 73.52 million, nearly approaching the current top-ranked Doubao. It’s worth noting that Qianwen, launched just 80 days ago, has achieved what took its competitor three years.

This means Alibaba, with a “30 billion free orders” campaign, has instantly positioned itself at the center of the AI game.

What might be even more unsettling for competitors is another dimension: the booming “AI service” applications represented by Qianwen indicate that user habits of internet usage are changing and evolving. “Qianwen help me” is gradually becoming a new user habit in the AI era.

Behind this is not only rapid advances in AI technology but also a blow to the business ecosystem’s traditional dimensions.

24-Hour Lightning Battle

At midnight on February 6, Qianwen’s “Spring Festival 3 Billion Free Orders” event officially launched.

The rules are simple and straightforward: download the app, get a 25 yuan free order card, and buy a milk tea for just one cent. Invite friends, and get another card.

This approach isn’t new. What’s new is Alibaba’s boldness—each person could get up to 21 cards, totaling 525 yuan, with no category restrictions or thresholds. That night, many industry insiders couldn’t resist trying and started ordering milk tea late into the night.

By dawn, the event reached a climax. According to official disclosures, within nine hours of launch, AI orders surpassed 10 million; the “help me buy” command was triggered over 30 million times. Qianwen app topped the App Store free charts within five hours and held the top spot for seven days straight, remaining at the top at the time of writing.

QuestMobile’s data is even clearer: on February 6, Qianwen’s DAU skyrocketed from 7.07 million the previous day to 58.48 million—a net increase of 51 million in a single day, with a growth rate of 727.7%, marking a miracle in this year’s Spring Festival AI battle.

For a long time, industry perception held that a 1-2x growth was normal in red envelope campaigns, until Qianwen shattered that ceiling.

An industry insider commented that Qianwen’s approach is highly effective. Based on their observations, many relatives, friends, and elders around them have installed Qianwen.

On February 12, Qianwen’s official release of the first batch of results for the “Spring Festival 3 Billion Free Orders” campaign showed that over six days, users spoke to their phones 4.1 billion times saying “Qianwen help me.” AI order placements exceeded 120 million.

4.1 billion times. This is the first time in global AI application history that “commands” and “transactions” have been linked at such a scale.

An Extreme Training, a Habit Shift

If the story ends here, it would be just another cliché of “spending money to gain volume.” But Qianwen clearly has no intention of following that script.

In this extreme training, highs and frustrations occurred almost simultaneously. On February 6, the servers experienced brief lag and login issues. The most severe was February 8—during the weekend milk tea consumption peak—when Qianwen app faced a second full outage. That afternoon, Qianwen’s official account posted a simple note on Xiaohongshu: “Today we are exhausted, please come back tomorrow.”

This intense stress test not only trained the Qianwen team but also demonstrated a formal shift in user consumption habits.

In the past, people often said that red envelopes could buy users but not habits.

In 2019, internet giants participated in the Spring Festival red envelope battle, with daily active users soaring from 160 million to 300 million, but the 7-day retention rate was less than 2%. This harsh reality served as a sober reminder of the true challenge in red envelope campaigns.

Once, red envelopes solved the entry problem; retention was the real game.

But what’s surprising in Qianwen’s data is the cultivation of habits. The 4.1 billion “Qianwen help me” commands mean many users, even without free order cards, chose to place orders via Qianwen, eager to experience this new way.

Returning to the Original Question: How to Win Over AI Users?

Hu Yanping, a distinguished professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, commented on this year’s AI user acquisition battle. He believes that unlike the internet era, the logic of gaining ground has changed—“Fundamentally, the quality of AI products determines user retention and engagement, not just traffic.”

The question is: what defines this quality? Over the past year, the industry’s mainstream narrative has been “AI must solve the last mile of user needs.” So, everyone has been competing fiercely in multimodal capabilities, long-text understanding, and reasoning abilities. These dialogue-based products have become the information hubs of the AI era.

But do users really need another search engine? Qianwen’s choice is: not to build an information-based AI, but a service-oriented AI. Instead of helping you write poetry or draw pictures, it directly helps you order milk tea, buy movie tickets, or book flights and hotels.

On February 7, after the campaign reached its peak, Qianwen announced that free order cards could be used to buy from Hema.

On February 10, Qianwen began testing integration with Damai, where users could say, “Help me buy two tickets for the premiere of ‘Jingzhe Wusheng,’ last row, around 8 pm,” and the AI would handle the entire process—from recommendation, seat selection, payment, to ticket issuance. This is the world’s first AI assistant capable of purchasing movie tickets.

On February 11, Qianwen App partnered with Fliggy, announcing cooperation with over 40 global travel brands, offering exclusive “Qianwen prices” with discounts up to 300 yuan per order for flights and hotels booked through Qianwen.

This is a long list. Behind Qianwen are Alibaba’s full ecosystem: Taobao, Ele.me, Fliggy, Hema, Gaode, Alipay—Alibaba owns China’s most comprehensive online and offline service ecosystem.

This is also why overseas AI giants haven’t been able to replicate this. OpenAI has no e-commerce business; Anthropic lacks a local lifestyle system. Over the past two years, while overseas giants have dominated the charts, AI has been used mainly for content creation and online work, which naturally has higher entry barriers for users.

A product leader at a domestic AI company once lamented to Phoenix Tech that in the two years since ChatGPT’s emergence, their team has found it difficult to open up AI’s user base beyond existing circles.

But the Qianwen campaign has broken this barrier. More and more consumers, regardless of age or region, are using AI to order milk tea, buy New Year goods, and this has marked the emergence of the first AI shopping era.

As stated in the February 12 report, Qianwen’s official statement: “In these six days, 1.56 million friends over 60 found it more convenient to order takeout with AI, experiencing it for the first time,” and “We have finally evolved AI from ‘chatting’ to ‘getting things done’.” This is probably a truth that many years of efforts by global AI giants have yet to fully grasp.

Alibaba’s Core Confidence

Qianwen’s rapid, lightning-like assault stems from two sources of confidence.

First, the full-stack AI capabilities under the “Tongyun Ge” layout. Second, Alibaba’s extensive supply and fulfillment capabilities accumulated over years in e-commerce, flash sales, travel, and hospitality, which have quickly evolved into an AI-callable and deliverable “food, clothing, housing, transportation, entertainment” service network. This is a solid moat built over the past two decades—perhaps only Google can rival it globally.

From the model perspective, as the core brain of Qianwen app, the open-source family of models has achieved impressive results—over 1 billion downloads worldwide, more than 200,000 derivative models. According to Hugging Face, over 200 new models are added daily by developers based on Qianwen.

Sullivan’s report indicates that by the first half of 2025, Qianwen models will hold the largest market share in China’s enterprise large-model usage. Serving over 1 million clients, even Meta’s new “Avocado” model chose to distill and use the open-source version of Qianwen.

This means Alibaba possesses sufficiently intelligent, user-intent-understanding large models, making each execution highly precise.

Few realize that AI battles not only test front-end reach but also backend stability and costs. All AI calls require massive computing power, as action-oriented agents often consume exponentially more tokens than dialogue.

Fortunately, Alibaba’s “Tongyun Ge” layout includes not only the open-source Qianwen models but also the self-developed Zhenwu 810E chips by Pingtouge and Alibaba Cloud’s leading cloud infrastructure. These form a robust technological triangle—each with top-tier strength, complementing each other.

According to real-world data, on Alibaba Cloud’s PAI platform, training Qianwen’s large models has achieved over threefold acceleration; inference throughput increased by 71%, and latency reduced by 70.6%. Pingtouge’s chips optimize operators for the MoE architecture, and Qianwen models are adapted to Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure, with customized environments provided. From the start, these three components are deeply integrated, minimizing technical losses.

A new consensus has emerged in the global tech community: future AI competition is not about single breakthroughs but a systematic project of “computing power + algorithms + infrastructure.” And judging from the Qianwen campaign, sufficient life service supply and fulfillment capabilities are also essential.

Every technological advance never just changes the lives of a few; from the Industrial Revolution to the Internet wave, only innovations that benefit millions can sustain long-term development.

This Spring Festival, some asked Qianwen to write Spring Festival couplets and New Year greetings; others asked it to check homework; still others told it, “Give me a 100x salary increase” or “buy eggs.” This is no longer just Qianwen’s breakout moment but a true watershed in the AI era.

Qianwen’s 80-day lightning campaign is not only a victory for itself but also a breakthrough for AI globally. On this level, all AI companies should thank Qianwen for its bold leap.