In an effort to increase rivalry with rivals, Alibaba enhanced the capabilities of its proprietary technology on Thursday and made more than 100 open-source artificial intelligence models available.
According to Alibaba, the recently launched Qwen 2.5 models are intended for usage in a variety of industries and applications, including gaming, science research, and automotive manufacturing. It also said that they are more proficient in arithmetic and coding.
The company, which has its headquarters in Hangzhou, wants to become more competitive against US giants like Microsoft and OpenAI as well as local competitors like Baidu and Huawei.
Massive volumes of data are used to train AI algorithms. Alibaba claims that its models can produce text and graphics as well as comprehend cues.
Because the models are open-source, anybody may use them to develop their own generative AI applications without having to invest time or money in training their own systems. This includes corporations, researchers, and academia worldwide. Alibaba wants more people to utilise its AI, therefore it is making the models publicly available.
The Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen, concept was initially introduced by the massive Chinese e-commerce company last year. Improved versions have since been produced, and the company claims that 40 million downloads of its open-source models have been made.
The business also announced an update to its closed-source, proprietary flagship model, Qwen-Max. Rather, Alibaba offers enterprises its capabilities through its cloud computing offerings. Alibaba said that Qwen Max 2.5-Max outperformed competitors in several domains, including language comprehension and reasoning, including Meta's Llama and OpenAI's GPT4.
Wu, who became Alibaba's CEO last year during a landmark restructuring, has been working to rekindle the company's growth despite obstacles including growing competition and a slowing Chinese customer base.
Alibaba is a major participant in the Chinese cloud computing market, but it lags behind companies like Microsoft and Amazon globally. In an attempt to stimulate a segment that has been slow but showed early signs of improvement in the June quarter, the firm is betting that its most recent AI solutions would entice clients both inside and outside of China to sign up for its cloud services.
(Sources: cnbc.com)
