Alibaba launches over 100 new AI models, releases text-to-video generation
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 ramp up competitors with rivals.
The newly-released fashions, often known as Qwen 2.5, are designed to be used in purposes and sectors starting from cars to gaming and science analysis, Alibaba stated. They’ve extra superior capabilities in math and coding, it added.
The Hangzhou-headquartered agency is trying to improve competition with domestic rivals corresponding to Baidu and Huawei, in addition to U.S. titans like Microsoft and OpenAI.
AI fashions are educated on big 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, teachers and firms — world wide can use the fashions to create their very own generative AI apps while not 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, model last year. Since then, it has launched improved variations and says that, up to now, its open supply fashions have been downloaded 40 million instances.
The corporate additionally stated that it upgraded its proprietary flagship mannequin known as Qwen-Max, which isn’t open-source. As an alternative, Alibaba sells its capabilites by means of its cloud computing merchandise to companies. Alibaba stated 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 instrument 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 similar to OpenAI’s Sora.
“Alibaba Cloud is investing, with unprecedented depth, within the analysis and growth of AI expertise and the constructing of its international infrastructure,” Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba, stated in a press release.
Wu, who took over the role of CEO at Alibaba last year 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 shopper.
Alibaba is without doubt one of 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 might tempt prospects 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 in the June quarter.
