Alibaba's office building is seen in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, August 28, 2024.
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alibaba Google on Thursday released more than 100 open-source artificial intelligence models and beefed up the capabilities of its own technology as it looks to increase competition with rivals.
Alibaba said the newly launched models, known as Qwen 2.5, are designed for use in applications and sectors ranging from automotive to gaming and scientific research, adding that they have more advanced math and coding capabilities.
The Hangzhou-headquartered company is looking to increase competition with local rivals such as Baidu Huawei, as well as US giants like Microsoft And OpenAI.
AI models are trained on massive amounts of data. Alibaba says its models can understand prompts and generate text and images.
Open source means that anyone — including researchers, academics, and businesses — around the world can use the models to create their own generative AI applications without having to train their own systems, saving time and expense. By making the models open source, Alibaba hopes to get more users to use its AI.
The Chinese e-commerce giant first launched its Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen, model last year. It has since released improved versions and says its open-source model has been downloaded 40 million times so far.
The company also said it has updated its flagship proprietary model called Qwen-Max, which is not open source. Instead, Alibaba sells its capabilities through cloud computing products to businesses. Alibaba said the Qwen Max 2.5-Max outperforms rivals like MetaOpenAI's Llama is collaborating with OpenAI's GPT4 in a number of areas including reasoning and language understanding.
Alibaba also launched a new text-to-video tool based on its own AI models. The tool allows users to input text and the AI will generate a video based on it. This is similar to OpenAI’s Sora.
“Alibaba Cloud is investing unprecedentedly heavily in the research and development of AI technology and building its global infrastructure,” Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said in a statement.
Wu, who took over as Alibaba's CEO last year amid a historic cabinet reshuffle, is trying to revitalize growth at the tech giant as it faces headwinds including rising competition and slowing Chinese consumer growth.
Alibaba is one of the largest cloud computing companies in China, but internationally, it lags behind its peers. Amazon The company hopes its latest AI offerings will attract customers inside and outside China to sign up for its cloud services, boosting a division that has been slow but showed early signs of acceleration in the second quarter.
