The Alibaba workplace constructing is seen in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, August 28, 2024.
CFOTO | Future publication | Getty Pictures
Alibaba.com on Thursday launched greater than 100 open-source synthetic intelligence fashions and boosted the capabilities of its proprietary expertise because it seems to extend competitors with rivals.
The newly launched fashions, generally known as Qwen 2.5, are designed to be used in purposes and industries starting from automotive to gaming and scientific analysis, Alibaba stated. They’ve extra superior capabilities in math and coding, it added.
The Hangzhou-based firm goals to extend competitors with home rivals Baidu and Huawei, but additionally like American titans Microsoft and Open AI.
AI fashions are skilled on huge quantities of information. Alibaba says its fashions have the power to know cues and generate textual content and pictures.
Open-source signifies that anybody – together with researchers, teachers and corporations – around the globe can use the fashions to create their very own generative AI apps with out having to coach their very own techniques, saving time and prices. By open sourcing the fashions, Alibaba hopes extra customers will use its AI.
The Chinese language e-commerce big first launched its Tongyi Qianwen or Qwen mannequin final yr. It has since launched improved variations and says its open supply fashions have been downloaded 40 million occasions to this point.
The corporate additionally stated it has upgraded its personal flagship mannequin known as Qwen-Max, which isn’t open-source. As an alternative, Alibaba sells its capabilities to companies via its cloud computing merchandise. Alibaba stated Qwen Max 2.5-Max surpassed rivals reminiscent of Meta‘s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT4 in a number of areas, together with reasoning and language understanding.
Alibaba additionally launched a brand new text-to-video instrument based mostly on its AI fashions. This permits customers to enter a immediate and the AI will create a video based mostly on it. That is just like OpenAI’s Sora.
“Alibaba Cloud is investing with unprecedented depth within the analysis and growth of AI expertise and constructing its international infrastructure,” stated Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba, in a press release.
Wu, who took over as CEO at Alibaba final yr amid a historic reshuffle, is making an attempt to revive progress on the tech big because it faces headwinds together with growing competitors and a sluggish Chinese language client.
Alibaba is among the largest cloud computing gamers in China, however internationally it’s simply lagging behind Amazon and Microsoft. The corporate hopes its newest AI providing can entice prospects inside and outdoors China to enroll in its cloud providers, boosting a division that has been sluggish however confirmed early indicators of acceleration within the June quarter.
