BEIJING, Feb 16 (Reuters) - Alibaba on Monday unveiled its new artificial intelligence model, Qwin 3.5, designed to perform complex tasks independently with significant improvements in performance and cost.

The Chinese giant says the improvements make its model superior to major American competitors in several criteria.

This release comes at a time when Alibaba is seeking to attract more users to its chat application Coin in China, a field currently dominated by its giant rival ByteDance with its Dobao model, as well as DeepSec, which became the first Chinese AI company to achieve global success last year.

Alibaba said the Coin 3.5 is 60 percent cheaper to use and eight times better at handling large loads than its immediate predecessor, adding that the model also has the ability to make decisions independently across mobile and desktop applications, or what the company calls "independent vision capabilities".

"Coin 3.5 is designed for the era of standalone AI to help developers and businesses move faster and do more using the same computing power," the company said in a statement.

On Saturday, ByteDance released Doobao 2.0, an update to its chat application, which currently boasts the largest user base in China, approaching 200 million users. The announcement, like Alibaba's, described the new model as suitable for the era of autonomous artificial intelligence.