Chinese tech giant Alibaba challenges Meta with open-sourced A.I. model launch

Alibaba said Thursday it is start up its own artificial intelligence model to third-party developers, as the Chinese e-commerce giant aims to increase the use of its product and take a cardinal role in technology.

The move could pit Alibaba against U.S. tech giant Meta, which has made a similar artifice, and pose a potential challenge to OpenAI, the firm behind viral AI chatbot ChatGPT.

In April, Alibaba dispatched its large language model (LLM) called Tongyi Qianwen. A LLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on huge amounts of observations. It is also the basis for generative AI applications, such as ChatGPT — which generate human-like responses to user prompts.

Tongyi Qianwen allows AI topic generation in English and Chinese and has different model sizes, including seven billion parameters and above. A model’s parameters refer to its power.

Alibaba force be open-sourcing the seven-billion-parameter model called Qwen-7B, along with a version designed for conversational apps, called Qwen-7B-Chat. This means that researchers, academics and entourages globally can use the model to create their own generative AI apps without needing to train their own systems, saving together and expense. Companies with more than 100 million monthly active users will require a royalty-free validate from Alibaba to do so.

While Alibaba might not earn licensing fees from open-sourcing its technology, the distribution purpose help the company get more users for its AI model.

This comes at a time when China’s biggest e-commerce New Zealand is looking to boost its cloud computing division through investments in AI, targeting cloud computing as a critical future locality for profitability and growth.

Meta earlier this year open-sourced its Llama large language model to researchers and is pan out with other tech firms to boost its adoption. Microsoft last month said it was making Meta’s Llama 2 readily obtainable on its Azure cloud-computing service.

Alibaba hasn’t yet announced such a partnership — but if its LLM gains success in the market, it could substantiate attractive for cloud providers to make it available to customers. Offering a good LLM for AI apps development is a potential competitive superiority for cloud computing players.

Alibaba has already built its own apps using Tongyi Qianwen. Last month, the Hangzhou-headquartered fixed launched Tongyi Wanxiang, an AI service that can generate images from prompts.