Alibaba Cloud is the latest cloud provider to get into the ChatGPT hype, with an LLM aimed at customers and developers.
Called Tongyi Qianwen (loosely translated from Chinese as “meaning of a thousand questions”), the artificial intelligence (AI) model will also power all of Alibaba’s business applications in the “near future”. The integration will aim to improve the user experience across all of its products and services, spanning e-commerce, search, browsing, entertainment, business communication and voice assistance, the company said on Tuesday. Chinese cloud service provider.
With Chinese and English language capabilities, Tongyi Qianwen first will be deployed on Alibaba’s DingTalk online collaboration platform, as well as the smart voice assistant Tmall Genie. Thanks to the language model, DingTalk can be used to write emails and business proposals. Users will also be able to create an app on DingTalk by taking a photo of an idea written on a piece of paper, according to Alibaba.
“More dynamic and lively” conversations with users in China
The company adds that Tmall Genie can engage in “more dynamic and lively” conversations with users in China, where the product is sold. The voice assistant can create and tell stories to children and suggest cooking recipes. Customers wishing to access Tongyi Qianwen to build their own large language models can do so through Alibaba’s cloud platform. The AI model is currently only available to the vendor’s enterprise customers in China as part of a beta test.
It’s also being offered as an API to Chinese developers for beta testing, Alibaba said, adding that the AI model will “soon” be made available for developers to build their own AI apps. AI for various verticals, such as logistics, manufacturing, energy, and retail.
Other projects are underway to add multimodal capabilities to Tongyi Qianwen, including image recognition and text-to-image conversion, the cloud provider said.
Tongyi, a pre-trained AI framework that encompasses converting text to images and short videos
The LLM runs on Tongyi, a pre-trained AI framework from Alibaba that encompasses various models, including converting text to images and short videos. Last year, the vendor launched a text-to-image AI model powered by Tongyi, ModelScope, which offers 800 models. The open-source platform currently has more than one million active users and to date has seen 16 million model downloads, according to Alibaba.
Daniel Zhang, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, said, “We are at a technological turning point driven by generative AI and cloud computing. Alibaba Cloud is committed to making compute and AI services more accessible and inclusive for enterprises and developers, enabling them to discover more information and explore new business models. »
Daniel Zhang, who also heads the company’s cloud business, confirmed last month that Alibaba was looking to harness generative AI, with its research arm Damo Academy building several models that developers could customize for use in content creation, covering the production of images and videos.
Alibaba’s shift isn’t just about AI
Alibaba announced a major overhaul of its organizational structure last month, dividing the company into six business units, each with its own CEO who will report to a board of directors. With the exception of Taobao Tmall Commerce Group, which remains a 100%-owned unit of Alibaba Group, each business group will have the opportunity to raise their own capital and apply for an IPO.
Daniel Zhang explains that the restructuring will allow the respective companies to be more agile, to take more autonomous decisions and to react more quickly to changes in the market. The six business entities are: Cloud Intelligence Group; Taobao Tmall Commerce Group; Local Services Group; Cainiao Smart Logistics; Global Digital Commerce Group; and Digital Media and Entertainment Group.
Describing the move as the biggest governance overhaul in Alibaba’s 24-year history, the Chinese tech giant said the restructuring would enable the company to “seize market opportunities and continue to drive growth.” growth “.
Source: ZDNet.com