Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today unveiled its latest large language model, Tongyi Qianwen. The new AI model will be integrated across Alibaba’s various businesses to improve user experience in the near future. The company’s customers and developers will have access to the model to create customised AI features in a cost-effective way. Alibaba first announced the chatbot on April 11, describing it as a tool that will increase efficiency across its diverse range of cloud-based workflow programs.
“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 Daniel Zhang, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “As a leading global cloud computing service provider, Alibaba Cloud is committed to making computing and AI services more accessible and inclusive for enterprises and developers, enabling them to uncover more insights, explore new business models for growth, and create more cutting-edge products and services for society.”
Tongyi Tingwu, the AI-powered assistant, will be able to analyze multimedia content and generate a text summary from video and audio files, according to Alibaba. It will initially be integrated into DingTalk, Alibaba’s workplace messaging app and can be used to summarise meeting notes, write emails, and draft business proposals. It will also be added to Tmall Genie, Alibaba’s voice assistant.
Tongyi Qianwen is based on Tongyi, Alibaba’s proprietary pre-trained model framework that unifies various AI models, including models that can turn text into images and short videos. Last year, Alibaba Cloud launched ModelScope, an open-source Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform with hundreds of AI models, including a Tongyi-based text-to-image model for global developers and researchers. So far, with over 1 million active users, ModelScope has made 800 models available with over 16 million model downloads to date.
According to a CNBC report, Alibaba plans to continually introduce more features for the chatbot throughout the year, including real-time English-to-Chinese translation of multimedia content and a Google Chrome extension.
