Alibaba Group signal is seen on the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China July 6, 2023.
Aly Song | Reuters
Alibaba mentioned Thursday it’s opening up its personal synthetic intelligence mannequin to third-party builders, because the Chinese e-commerce big goals to extend using its product and take a number one function in expertise.
The transfer may pit Alibaba in opposition to U.S. tech big Meta, which has made an identical transfer, and pose a possible problem to OpenAI, the agency behind viral AI chatbot ChatGPT.
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In April, Alibaba launched its massive language mannequin (LLM) known as Tongyi Qianwen. A LLM is a man-made intelligence mannequin skilled on enormous quantities of knowledge. It can also be the idea for generative AI purposes, corresponding to ChatGPT — which generate human-like responses to consumer prompts.
Tongyi Qianwen permits AI content material technology in English and Chinese and has totally different mannequin sizes, together with seven billion parameters and above. A mannequin’s parameters seek advice from its energy.
Alibaba can be open-sourcing the seven-billion-parameter mannequin known as Qwen-7B, together with a model designed for conversational apps, known as Qwen-7B-Chat. This implies that researchers, teachers and corporations globally can use the mannequin to create their very own generative AI apps with no need to coach their very own methods, saving time and expense. Companies with greater than 100 million month-to-month lively customers would require a royalty-free license from Alibaba to take action.
While Alibaba may not earn licensing charges from open-sourcing its expertise, the distribution will assist the corporate get extra customers for its AI mannequin.
This comes at a time when China’s largest e-commerce firm is seeking to enhance its cloud computing division by way of investments in AI, concentrating on cloud computing as a vital future space for profitability and development.
Meta earlier this yr open-sourced its Llama massive language mannequin to researchers and is working with different tech companies to spice up its adoption. Microsoft final month mentioned it was making Meta’s Llama 2 accessible on its Azure cloud-computing service.
Alibaba hasn’t but introduced such a partnership — but when its LLM beneficial properties success available in the market, it may show enticing for cloud suppliers to make it accessible to prospects. Offering a great LLM for AI apps improvement is a possible aggressive benefit for cloud computing gamers.
Alibaba has already constructed its personal apps utilizing Tongyi Qianwen. Last month, the Hangzhou-headquartered agency launched Tongyi Wanxiang, an AI service that may generate pictures from prompts.
Source: www.cnbc.com”