Alibaba, a major player in Chinese e-commerce, has stated that it will make its own artificial intelligence model available to outside developers in an effort to broaden the appeal of its products and establish itself as a leader in the field of technology.

The plan might pit Alibaba against American tech giant Meta, which recently made a comparable move, and challenge OpenAI, the company behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.

Tongyi Qianwen, Alibaba’s large language model (LLM), was introduced in April. An artificial intelligence model called an LLM is developed using vast volumes of data. Additionally, it serves as the foundation for generative AI programmes like ChatGPT, which create human-like responses to user prompts.

Tongyi Qianwen includes various model sizes, including seven billion parameters and above, and allows the creation of AI content in both Chinese and English. The parameters of a model describe its strength.

Along with a version made for conversational apps, named Qwen-7B-Chat, Alibaba will open-source the seven billion parameter model known as Qwen-7B. This means that instead of having to invest time and money in training their own systems, researchers, academics, and businesses from all over the world can utilise the model to develop their own generative AI products. A royalty-free licence from Alibaba will be necessary for organisations with more than 100 million active monthly users.

Alibaba may not receive licencing fees from sharing its technology, but doing so will increase the number of people using its AI model.

This occurs at a time when China’s largest e-commerce company is attempting to increase the profitability and development of its cloud computing sector by making investments in AI.

Early this year, Meta released its Llama large language model as open source to researchers and is collaborating with other tech companies to increase use. Microsoft said last month that Meta’s Llama 2 would be made available on its Azure cloud-computing platform.

Although Alibaba hasn’t yet made such a relationship official, if their LLM succeeds in the market, cloud providers may be enticed to provide it to users. A possible competitive advantage for cloud computing vendors is to provide a strong LLM for the creation of AI apps.

Alibaba has already used Tongyi Qianwen to create its own apps. The company with its headquarters in Hangzhou just developed Tongyi Wanxiang, an AI tool that can create graphics from suggestions.

(Adapted from TBSNews.net)

Categories: Creativity, Economy & Finance, Entrepreneurship, Strategy