Alibaba Cloud, has launched its latest artificial intelligence (AI) model dubbed Tongyi Qianwen, designed to improve user experience across its products and services.
With both Chinese and English language capabilities, the AI model will be integrated into Alibaba’s business applications in the “near future”. The model will power Alibaba’s online collaboration workplace platform DingTalk, enabling users to write emails and draft business proposals. Additionally, the AI model will power Alibaba’s smart voice assistant, Tmall Genie, which can create and tell stories to kids and offer diet recipes.
Alibaba Cloud offers the AI model as an API for developers in China to beta test. It will also soon be made available to developers to build their own AI applications for various verticals, such as logistics, manufacturing, energy, and retail. Tongyi Qianwen is currently available to the vendor’s enterprise customers in China for beta testing.
Further plans are in place to add multimodal capabilities, including image recognition and text-to-image, to the AI model. It runs on Tongyi, Alibaba’s pre-trained AI framework that encompasses various models, including converting text to images and short videos. The open source platform currently has more than one million active users and has clocked 16 million model downloads to date, according to Alibaba.
Alibaba Group Chairman and CEO, Daniel Zhang, said the AI model demonstrates the company’s commitment to making computing and AI services more accessible and inclusive for enterprises and developers. “We are at a technological watershed moment driven by generative AI and cloud computing, and businesses across all sectors have started to embrace intelligence transformation to stay ahead of the game,” said Zhang.
The sources for this piece include an article in ZDNET.