Alibaba Open-Sources Its AI Model to Third-Party Developers, Aims to Lead in Emerging Technologies

On Thursday, Alibaba announced that it has made its AI model open source for third-party developers, with the aim of increasing the usage of its products and taking a leading role in emerging technologies in the Chinese e-commerce giant.

This move could put Alibaba in competition with the American tech giant Meta, which has taken a similar step, and it poses a potential challenge to OpenAI, the company behind the famous chatbot ChatGPT.

In April last year, Alibaba launched its large language model called Tongyi Qianwen, noting that large language models are AI tools trained on vast amounts of data and also serve as the foundation for generative AI applications like ChatGPT, which responds to questions in natural language similar to humans.

The Tongyi Qianwen model allows AI content generation in both English and Chinese, with varying capabilities.

Alibaba plans to provide its 7 billion parameter model, named Qwen-7B, along with a version designed for chat applications, called Qwen-7B-Chat. This means researchers, academics, and companies worldwide can use the model to create their own AI applications without the need to train their own systems, saving time and expenses.

However, companies with over 100 million monthly active users need to obtain a license from Alibaba to do so.

While Alibaba may not earn licensing fees from making its technology open source, the distribution will help the company gain more users for its AI model.

This comes at a time when China’s largest e-commerce company is looking to strengthen its cloud computing division through investments in artificial intelligence, targeting cloud computing as a crucial area for profit and growth.

It’s worth noting that Meta had previously announced the availability of its large language model called Llama for researchers and is working with other tech companies to promote the adoption of the model.

Microsoft also announced last month that it will make Meta’s Llama 2 model available in its Azure cloud computing service.

While Alibaba has not yet announced similar partnerships, if its large language model proves successful in the market, it could become attractive for cloud service providers to make it available to their customers.

Offering a robust AI model for developing AI applications is a potential competitive advantage for cloud computing operators.