Ant Group’s LingGuang AI App Surges Past One Million Downloads
Ant Group’s latest innovation, the “vibe coding” application titled LingGuang, has rapidly captured public attention, achieving over one million downloads within a mere four days. This phenomenon eclipses the record previously held by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
However, the app’s groundbreaking capability to generate applications from user prompts faced a temporary halt on Thursday evening, attributed to overwhelming demand, as announced by Ant Group on Weibo.
By Saturday, LingGuang ascended to the pinnacle of Apple’s mainland China App Store for free utilities and secured the seventh position among all free applications.
The company remarked that this achievement positions LingGuang as a formidable contender within the swiftly changing global AI landscape.
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Ant Group operates as a subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding, the parent company of the Post.
The concept of vibe coding, which facilitates the creation of tailored software applications by novice programmers, has burgeoned into one of the most lauded applications of generative AI on a global scale.
In comparison, the United States-based leader in vibe coding, Replit, remarkably escalated its annual recurring revenue from US$10 million in late 2024 to over US$100 million by June of this year.
In contrast to other vibe coding solutions, which utilise AI to produce code, Ant Group’s LingGuang takes an avant-garde approach by directly crafting the applications requested by users, effectively serving each individual as “their own personal AI developer.”
Following the initial app creation, users are encouraged to engage with the AI, customising features to suit their preferences. LingGuang’s technical lead and former Google engineer, Cai Wei, noted that users have, on average, undertaken six rounds of modifications per session, surpassing initial forecasts.
“It is the industry’s inaugural mobile app that enables users to effortlessly generate and personalise applications,” Cai disclosed to domestic media on Thursday.
Examples of applications generated by Ant Group’s LingGuang multimodal AI assistant. Photo: Handout
Moreover, LingGuang encompasses traditional chatbot functionalities, complete with multimodal inputs and outputs, and is available for international use.
Inception of the LingGuang project commenced in March, under the vigilance of Ant Group’s Chief Technology Officer, He Zhengyu, a distinguished PhD alumnus from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
This year, Ant Group has fortified its commitment to AI by launching an “AGI Lab”, dedicated to accelerating the development of avant-garde AI models.
In tandem, Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing branch of Hangzhou-based Alibaba, has unveiled its flagship AI application, Qwen, touted as a potential super app for China’s AI future.
The launches of Qwen and LingGuang coincided with the return of Alibaba founder Jack Ma to Ant Group’s Hangzhou headquarters, nearly a year after he endorsed the company’s AI-centric strategy in a rare public address.
In addressing the relationship between LingGuang and Qwen, He remarked that the simultaneity of their launches was “purely coincidental,” while clarifying that LingGuang utilised Qwen alongside other open-source Chinese models.
He articulately expressed the synergy of their efforts: “My view is that we are like comrades working together towards artificial general intelligence.”
Source link: Ca.news.yahoo.com.
