The Alibaba workplace constructing is seen in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, Aug 28, 2024.
CFOTO | Future Publishing | Getty Photographs
Alibaba on Thursday launched greater than 100 open-source synthetic intelligence fashions and boosted the capabilities of its proprietary expertise because it appears to be like to ramp up competitors with rivals.
The newly-released fashions, referred to as Qwen 2.5, are designed to be used in purposes and sectors starting from vehicles to gaming and science analysis, Alibaba mentioned. They’ve extra superior capabilities in math and coding, it added.
The Hangzhou-headquartered agency is seeking to improve competitors with home rivals akin to Baidu and Huawei, in addition to U.S. titans like Microsoft and OpenAI.
AI fashions are educated on large quantities of knowledge. Alibaba says its fashions have the abiltiy to know prompts and generate texts and pictures.
Open-source implies that anybody — together with researchers, teachers and firms — around the globe can use the fashions to create their very own generative AI apps without having to coach their very own programs, saving time and expense. By open sourcing the fashions, Alibaba hopes extra customers will use its AI.
The Chinese language e-commerce large first launched its Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen, mannequin final yr. Since then, it has launched improved variations and says that, to this point, its open supply fashions have been downloaded 40 million occasions.
The corporate additionally mentioned that it upgraded its proprietary flagship mannequin referred to as Qwen-Max, which isn’t open-source. As a substitute, Alibaba sells its capabilites by means of its cloud computing merchandise to companies. Alibaba mentioned that Qwen Max 2.5-Max surpassed rivals akin to Meta‘s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT4 in a number of areas inclduing reasoning and language comprehension.
Alibaba additionally launched a brand new text-to-video software primarily based on its AI fashions. This enables customers to enter a immediate and the AI will create a video primarily based on it. That is much like OpenAI’s Sora.
“Alibaba Cloud is investing, with unprecedented depth, within the analysis and growth of AI expertise and the constructing of its world infrastructure,” Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba, mentioned in an announcement.
Wu, who took over the position of CEO at Alibaba final yr amid a historic reshuffle, has been making an attempt to reinvigorate progress on the tech large, because it faces headwinds together with rising competitors and a sluggish Chinese language client.
Alibaba is without doubt one of the greatest cloud computing gamers in China, however internationally, it trails the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. The corporate is hoping that its newest AI choices could tempt prospects inside and outdoors of China to enroll to its cloud companies, boosting a division which has been sluggish however confirmed early signal of an acceleration within the June quarter.
