Alibaba Cloud Unveils New AI Model
- By Paul Mah
- April 19, 2023
Alibaba Cloud has unveiled a new ChatGPT-like AI model to support the intelligence transformation of enterprises.
According to the Chinese cloud giant, the new large language model, Tongyi Qianwen, has Chinese and English language capabilities and will enable businesses to create cost-effective AI features.
Tongyi Qianwen
Tongyi Qianwen is based on Tongyi, Alibaba’s proprietary pre-trained model framework that unifies various AI models, including models that can turn text into images and short videos.
A Tongyi-based text-to-image model for developers and researchers was made available last year on ModelScope, an open-source Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform with hundreds of AI models and a million active users.
Tongyi Qianwen doesn’t currently have multimodal capabilities, though Alibaba Cloud says image understanding and text-to-image capabilities will be added “soon”.
The new AI model will be gradually integrated across Alibaba’s various businesses. For now, it will first be deployed on DingTalk, Alibaba’s digital collaboration workplace and application development platform, and Tmall Genie, a provider of IoT-enabled smart home appliances.
DingTalk will gain the ability to summarize meeting notes, turn meeting conversations into text, write emails, and draft business proposals or promotion campaign plans through simple prompts.
Tmall Genie will be able to engage in more dynamic and vivid conversations with users in China. It can develop and tell stories to children, provide healthy diet recipes, offer travel tips, and recommend background music for a workout.
Enterprises can use Tongyi Qianwen to establish tailored AI models to suit their specific business needs on Alibaba Cloud, fine-tuning it with proprietary intelligence and industrial know-how in a secure cloud environment.
“Generative AI powered by large language models is ushering in an unprecedented new phase. In this latest AI era, we can create additional value for our customers and broader communities through our resilient public cloud infrastructure and proven AI capabilities,” said Jingren Zhou, chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
“We are witnessing a new paradigm of AI development where cloud and AI models play an essential role. By making this paradigm more inclusive, we hope to facilitate businesses from all industries with their intelligence transformation. [And], ultimately, help boost their business productivity, and expand their expertise and capabilities while unlocking more exciting opportunities through innovations.”
Tongyi Qianwen is currently available for general enterprise customers in China for beta testing.
As reported by the South China Morning Post, competition among Chinese tech giants is heating up. This week, TikTok owner ByteDance launched an updated cloud-based ML platform to help train LLMs.
Baidu also said that it will integrate the technology behind its Ernie Bot into its internal smart work platform, InfoFlow, while Tencent Holdings’ cloud unit launched a next-gen computing cluster designed to provide the computational power for training LLMs and self-driving technologies.
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: bingdian
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.