Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, has announced the launch of its own ChatGPT-style generative AI model called Tongyi Qianwen.
According to the tech giant, the Tongyi Qianwen will soon be rolled out across its products.
In a demonstration, Tongyi Qianwen was shown drafting invitation letters, planning trip itineraries, and providing makeup recommendations to shoppers.
Initially, Tongyi Qianwen will be integrated into DingTalk, which is Alibaba’s messaging app for workplaces. It can be utilized to summarize meeting notes, write emails, and create business proposals. Additionally, Tongyi Qianwen will be incorporated into Tmall Genie, which is Alibaba’s voice assistant.
During a livestreamed event, CEO Daniel Zhang expressed that this technology will result in significant changes to how we produce, work, and live our lives.
According to Zhang, AI models such as Tongyi Qianwen are crucial for making AI more widespread in the future.
“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 in a statement.
Alibaba Cloud intends to permit clients to create their own customised large language models using Tongyi Qianwen, and registration for the technology has already started.
Enterprises can fine-tune Tongyi Qianwen with their proprietary intelligence and industrial expertise in a secure cloud environment to develop tailored AI models that meet their specific business requirements. This is expected to fuel growth for customers, eliminating the need for resource-intensive and expensive pre-training processes. Tongyi Qianwen is now available for beta testing to general enterprise customers in China.
In addition, developers will soon be able to use Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qianwen to develop their AI applications at scale, further enhancing the AI software ecosystem in various industries such as logistics, media, finance, manufacturing, energy, retail, and more. The Tongyi Qianwen API is also available for developers in China to apply for beta testing now.
The popularity of generative AI, which utilises past data to create new content, has grown significantly since the introduction of ChatGPT by Microsoft-supported OpenAI last year.
Several Chinese firms have unveiled or hinted at their own AI models and chatbots, including search giant Baidu, which presented its Ernie Bot chatbot earlier this year, but it is only available to trial users at present.
Earlier this month, prominent tech leaders and experts have issued a joint call for the AI community to put a “pause” on the development of AI solutions like GPT-4. Among the signatories are Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, and Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter. The experts argue that the pace of the AI race is so fast that even its creators cannot fully comprehend, forecast, or effectively regulate it.
