Alibaba Unleashes AI Powerhouse: Alibaba, the Chinese tech juggernaut, has thrown its hat into the ring of the AI arms race with a significant update to its AI model, Tongyi Qianwen 2.0. This souped-up version boasts “hundreds of billions of” parameters, a key metric of AI model capability, putting it among the world’s most potent AI models by this measure. In addition to this upgrade, Alibaba has introduced eight industry-specific AI models tailored for fields like entertainment, finance, healthcare, and law.
The remarkable speed at which these advancements have been made underscores the competitive frenzy in China’s burgeoning AI market. Rival Tencent recently characterized this environment as a “war of a hundred models,” with more than 130 models vying for dominance. Tencent’s Hunyuan AI, with over 100 billion parameters, has made waves by outstripping OpenAI’s GPT-4 in processing Chinese.
This move by Alibaba is a testament to the dynamism of the tech landscape in China, where AI is evolving at breakneck speed. It’s also a clear indication that the battle for AI supremacy is far from over, as companies race to harness the potential of this transformative technology.
Alibaba’s industry-specific models have already gone live, providing dedicated tools for image creation, coding, financial data analysis, and legal document searches. At their annual conference, Alibaba’s Chairman Joe Tsai also revealed a remarkable statistic: approximately half of the large-language AI models in China now run on Alibaba Cloud. He went on to highlight the expansive reach of Alibaba’s AI ecosystem, with the AI model-sharing platform, Model Scope, hosting 2,300 models and involving 2.7 million contributing developers.
In this high-stakes AI game, the future promises even more rapid developments and an ever-intensifying race to push the boundaries of what AI can achieve.