Alibaba released greater than 100 open-source artificial intelligence models on Thursday, expanding the capabilities of its proprietary technology to accentuate competition with rivals.
The newly released models, referred to as Qwen 2.5, are designed to be used in applications and sectors starting from automotive to gaming to scientific research, Alibaba said. They feature more advanced capabilities in math and coding, it added.
The Hangzhou-based company goals to compete with domestic rivals resembling baidu and Huawei in addition to US titans like Microsoft and OpenAI.
AI models are trained on huge amounts of knowledge. Alibaba says its models are in a position to understand prompts and generate text and pictures.
Open source means anyone – including researchers, academics and firms – around the globe can use the models to construct their very own generative AI apps without having to coach their very own systems, saving time and costs. By making the models open source, Alibaba hopes more users will use its AI.
The Chinese e-commerce giant launched its Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen, model last yr. Since then, it has released improved versions and says its open-source models have been downloaded 40 million times so far.
The company also announced that it has upgraded its proprietary flagship model called Qwen-Max, which is just not open source. Instead, Alibaba sells its capabilities to enterprises through its cloud computing products. Alibaba said Qwen Max 2.5-Max rivals resembling Meta's Llama and OpenAI's GPT4 in several areas, including logical reasoning and language understanding.
Alibaba has also released a brand new text-to-video tool based on its AI models. It lets users type in a prompt and the AI creates a video based on it. This is comparable to OpenAI's Sora.
“Alibaba Cloud is investing with unprecedented intensity in researching and developing AI technology and building its global infrastructure,” Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said in a press release.
Wu, who took over as CEO of Alibaba last yr in a historic cabinet reshuffle, is attempting to reignite growth on the technology giant, which has faced headwinds including increasing competition and weakness amongst Chinese consumers.
Alibaba is certainly one of the most important cloud computing players in China, but lags behind firms internationally resembling Amazon and Microsoft. The company hopes its latest AI offerings will entice customers inside and out of doors China to subscribe to its cloud services, boosting a division that has been sluggish but showed early signs of acceleration within the June quarter.
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