AI chaos at Alibaba: overloaded chatbot shuts down at peak time

Alibaba‘s ambitious AI chatbot Qwen gave up during a promotional campaign for the Chinese Spring Festival. The chatbot couldn’t handle the huge influx of users and temporarily stopped issuing discount vouchers. Embarrassing for the tech giant, who wanted to show how far its AI had already progressed.

Technical glitch: “Too enthusiastic”

The problems arose when Alibaba launched a promotion last week in which users could order free bubble tea from popular chains such as Heytea and Luckin Coffee via Qwen, which helps users shop using voice commands. The promotion was part of a larger 3 billion yuan (about 430 million euro) plan to attract new users during the Spring Festival, a period when Chinese people traditionally shop online en masse. Within nine hours, 10 million orders had already been placed – an unprecedented success, but also the beginning of the trouble.