The Alibaba workplace constructing is seen in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, Aug 28, 2024.
CFOTO | Future Publishing | Getty Pictures
Alibaba on Thursday launched greater than 100 open-source synthetic intelligence fashions and boosted the capabilities of its proprietary know-how because it appears to be like to ramp up competitors with rivals.
The newly-released fashions, generally known 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 trying to improve competitors with home rivals corresponding 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 grasp prompts and generate texts and pictures.
Open-source implies that anybody — together with researchers, lecturers and firms — world wide can use the fashions to create their very own generative AI apps while not having to coach their very own methods, 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, so far, its open supply fashions have been downloaded 40 million occasions.
The corporate additionally mentioned that it upgraded its proprietary flagship mannequin known as Qwen-Max, which isn’t open-source. As a substitute, Alibaba sells its capabilites by way of its cloud computing merchandise to companies. Alibaba mentioned that Qwen Max 2.5-Max surpassed rivals corresponding 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 permits 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 improvement of AI know-how and the constructing of its international infrastructure,” Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba, mentioned in a press release.
Wu, who took over the position of CEO at Alibaba final yr amid a historic reshuffle, has been making an attempt to reinvigorate development on the tech large, because it faces headwinds together with rising competitors and a sluggish Chinese language client.
Alibaba is among the largest 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 clients inside and outdoors of China to enroll to its cloud providers, boosting a division which has been sluggish however confirmed early signal of an acceleration within the June quarter.