China's rapid AI adoption has found another compelling case study in the health sector. Earlier this week, Ant Group announced major upgrades to its AI health app AQ, now with a new Chinese name, "Ant A-Fu." The update signals not just a product iteration, but a broader shift in how AI is being woven into everyday life across the country.
The upgraded app is built around three core capabilities: health Q&A, AI health companion, and integrated health services. Rather than replacing hospitals or doctors, AQ is positioned to bridge the gap between daily wellness and professional medical care, handling routine inquiries and lifestyle habits before they escalate.
"AQ is designed to help users address common, daily health questions and support healthy habit formation," said Zhang Junjie, Vice President of Ant Group and Head of its Health Business. "It focuses on health needs that don't yet require going to a hospital."
AQ's successful positioning has led to rapid market adoption. Since its launch in June 2025, AQ has grown to 15 million monthly active users, up from 10 million just a month ago. The app now answers more than 5 million health-related questions every day, establishing itself as a trusted AI health companion for users across China.
This momentum reflects a broader reality: China's AI adoption is accelerating at scale. While the United States ignited the global AI boom with ChatGPT in 2022, China is today the only country able to truly rival it, though the two systems are advancing along very different paths.
While the American model privileges frontier research, cinematic AI, and financial trading, the Chinese approach prioritizes making services accessible to the widest demographic. China emphasizes rapid, large-scale deployment, judging success by how quickly AI can be rolled out across factories, cities, and public services. Practical impact matters more than theoretical benchmarks.
At its core, this divergence reflects two philosophies: China prioritizes system-wide functionality, while the U.S. prioritizes technological ambition. As Jeffrey Ding notes, history shows that economic advantage often shifts not to the pioneers of a technology, but to the best diffusers of it. Thus, global AI leadership will not be determined solely by who invents first, but by who integrates AI most effectively across the widest expanse of society.
The "Two-Giants" Dynamic
Within China, the AI application market is increasingly crystallizing into a "two-giants" dynamic, with Alibaba and ByteDance emerging as the dominant rivals. Their competition is no longer centered on any single model or product, but has evolved into a comprehensive, ecosystem-level battle encompassing infrastructure, platforms, and end-user applications.
Alibaba's advantage lies in its full-stack capabilities, tightly integrated commercial ecosystem, and long-standing presence in enterprise services. The company plans to invest RMB 380 billion in cloud and AI infrastructure over the next three years. Its Qwen model family has grown into one of the world's largest open-source AI ecosystems, surpassing 600 million downloads and spawning more than 170,000 derivative models.
At the application level, Alibaba has assembled a strong portfolio that includes the Qwen app, Quark. Its affiliate Ant Group also launched the AI health app AQ and the LingGuang AI assistant. According to QuestMobile, AQ has already entered the top five AI-native apps in China, with the highest compound monthly growth rate at 83.4%, far outpacing the industry average of 13.5%. LingGuang similarly attracted millions of downloads within days of its launch in November 2025.
ByteDance, by contrast, is advancing through an aggressive, consumer-first strategy powered by strong product design and unparalleled traffic scale. Drawing on platforms such as Douyin and its AI assistant Doubao, the company benefits from a content-driven distribution advantage. Its Doubao large language model now handles more than 16.4 trillion tokens daily. With tools like Coze, an AI application development platform, and a deliberate push to continuously lower model usage costs, ByteDance is actively courting developers and enterprise customers alike.
Put simply, ByteDance prioritizes user engagement and emotional resonance, while Alibaba's AI ecosystem is built around functionality, efficiency, and real-world application.
Ant Group's AQ is also about practical impact for the widest user base. It may not grab headlines for pushing the limits of model size or abstract capability, but it demonstrates something equally important: how AI, when deployed at scale and embedded into daily routines, can quietly reshape how people live, work, and take care of their health.
A Shift in the West
Interestingly, while AQ is making headlines with its rapid adoption, the AI industry in the US is also seeing a directional shift towards practicality, driven by intensifying competition. Just recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared an internal "Code Red" following the launch of Google's Gemini 3 Pro. Google's new model has claimed the "benchmark crown" in key areas of reasoning and agentic workflow, prompting OpenAI to pause peripheral projects and aggressively accelerate the release of GPT-5.2. This reactionary move underscores a new phase in the Western market where maintaining theoretical dominance is no longer enough—companies must now prove their models can deliver superior, practical utility in real-time.
