Alibaba launches open source AI models
Alibaba has launched more than 100 open-source AI models and enhanced the capabilities of its technology as it looks to increase competition with rivals.
The newly released models, known as Qwen 2.5, are designed for use in various applications and sectors, such as automotive, gaming and scientific research, and have advanced capabilities in mathematics and programming, the company said.
Alibaba is looking to compete with domestic rivals, such as Huawei and Baidu, as well as foreign competitors, such as Microsoft, Google and OpenAI.
The company trained its AI models on large amounts of data, and Alibaba said its models were able to understand prompts and generate text and images.
Open source means that anyone — including researchers, academics, and companies — around the world can use the models to create generative AI applications without having to train their own systems, saving time and expense.
By making the models open source, Alibaba hopes more people will use its AI models.
The Chinese e-commerce giant first launched its Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen, model last year.
Since then, it has released improved versions and says its open source models have been downloaded over 40 million times.
Competitors have adopted a closed-source approach, while Alibaba has adopted a hybrid model, investing in developing both closed-source and open-source models to scale its AI products.
The company also said it has updated its flagship model called Qwen-Max, which is not open source. Alibaba sells Qwen-Max capabilities through its cloud computing products to businesses.
Alibaba noted that Qwen Max 2.5-Max outperforms competitors such as Meta's Llama and OpenAI's GPT4 in several areas, including reasoning and language understanding.
Alibaba also launched a new text-to-video tool based on its AI models, allowing users to enter a prompt and the AI generates a video based on it.
“The company is investing unprecedentedly heavily in the research and development of AI technology and building its global infrastructure,” Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said in a statement.
Wu was trying to revive growth at the tech giant, which has been facing problems including increased competition and slowing Chinese consumption.
Alibaba is one of the biggest cloud computing companies in China, although it lags behind the likes of Amazon and Microsoft internationally.
The company hopes its AI offerings will encourage customers inside and outside China to sign up for its cloud services, boosting a segment that has been slow but showed early signs of acceleration in the second quarter of this year.
