Alibaba, the e-commerce giant from China, has announced its decision to open-source its artificial intelligence model, aiming to expand the use of its product and develop a strong presence in the IT industry. This move puts Alibaba in competition with U.S. tech giant Meta, which has also made a similar move with its Llama large language model. It presents a potential
challenge to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In April, Alibaba introduced its large language model (LLM) called Tongyi Qianwen, an AI model trained on vast amounts of data and used as the foundation for generative AI applications like ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts.
The Tongyi Qianwen model enables AI content generation in English and Chinese and comes in different sizes, including the seven-billion-parameter model, Qwen-7B. Alongside this, Alibaba is also open-sourcing a version specifically designed for conversational apps called Qwen-7B-Chat. By releasing these open-source models, researchers, academics, and companies worldwide can leverage them to create generative AI applications without training their systems, saving time and expenses. However, companies with over 100 million monthly active users will require a royalty-free license from Alibaba to use the model.
Although Alibaba may not earn licensing fees from open-sourcing its technology, this distribution will help the company gain more users for its AI model. This move aligns with Alibaba’s strategy of strengthening its cloud computing division through investments in AI, as the company considers cloud computing a critical area for future profitability and growth.
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has also open-sourced its Llama large language model and is collaborating with other tech firms to promote its adoption. Microsoft, for example, has made Meta’s Llama 2 available on its Azure cloud-computing service.
While Alibaba has not yet announced any specific partnerships, if its LLM proves successful, it could attract cloud providers to offer it to their customers. Offering a high-quality LLM for AI app development can become a competitive advantage for players in the cloud computing industry.
In addition to open-sourcing its AI models, Alibaba has already utilized Tongyi Qianwen to build its apps. Recently, the company launched Tongyi Wanxiang, an AI service capable of generating images from user prompts.
With these moves, Alibaba aims to cement its position in the AI space and further explore the potential of its AI technology in various applications, particularly within the cloud computing sector.