Alibaba’s cloud computing division has achieved a significant milestone by becoming the first Chinese enterprise to offer support for Meta’s open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model, Llama. This development allows Chinese business users on Alibaba Cloud to develop programs using the Llama model.
Meta recently launched Llama2, a commercial version of Llama, as a powerful and cost-effective alternative to proprietary AI models from companies like OpenAI and Google. While Meta’s preferred partner for Llama2 is Microsoft, it has made the model available through other partners as well.
In an announcement on their WeChat account, Alibaba Cloud stated, “Today, Alibaba Cloud has launched the first training and deployment solution for the entire Llama2 series in China, welcoming all developers to create customized large models on Alibaba Cloud.”
The collaboration with Meta could result in long-term customers for Alibaba’s cloud business, especially amid intensified competition in the Chinese market and the company’s plans for a stock market listing.
For Alibaba, working with Meta on Llama2 allows them to further their AI ambitions and stay up-to-date with the latest developments in AI technology, even amid restrictions imposed by the U.S. on Chinese companies’ access to certain technologies.
For Meta, a partnership with Alibaba Cloud opens doors to a closer relationship with the world’s second-largest economy, where its Facebook platform, along with other Western platforms, has been banned for years.
China has been making significant efforts to catch up with the U.S. in the field of AI, encouraging Chinese companies to develop their own “controllable” AI models to rival those developed by U.S. counterparts. Alibaba, along with other tech giants like Tencent Holdings, has been actively working on developing their own AI models.
Llama2, similar to other popular chatbot models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, is a large machine learning model trained on vast amounts of data to generate coherent and natural-sounding outputs.
According to Meta, Llama2 is available for free to companies with fewer than 700 million monthly active users, while larger programs will require a license from Meta. Both Meta and Alibaba Cloud declined to comment further on the collaboration.
