Alibaba is moving into the consumer smart headset space with the Quark AI Glasses, starting at 4,699 yuan (about $660). Pre-orders open on October 24, with deliveries set for December. The glasses use Alibaba's Qwen model and Quark "multimodal AI," providing features like phone calls, music playback, and real-time translation. Alibaba is positioning the device as a direct competitor to Meta's AI smart glasses, and it enters the race with a stronger lineup of AI models compared to Meta's Llama.
Alongside the headset, Alibaba is rolling out a new AI Chat Assistant inside the Quark app. The chatbot supports both text and voice input, and can handle tasks like photo editing and task management. With these launches, Alibaba is positioning itself alongside competitors like Meta, Xiaomi, and OpenAI in the push for consumer AI devices.
Apple recently published a widely discussed study revealing major weaknesses in current reasoning models. Now, the company is hiring for exactly this area.
A new opening on Apple's MIND team in Seattle targets experts in reasoning, planning, tool use, and agent-based LLMs. Candidates should have experience with large-scale model training, PyTorch, RAG, multimodal models, Jax, and hardware-optimized inference. The goal is to develop new LLM and VLM architectures that are more accurate and efficient.
