China’s Alibaba launches over 100 new open-source AI fashions, releases text-to-video technology software

Alibaba on Thursday launched greater than 100 open-source synthetic intelligence fashions and boosted the capabilities of its proprietary expertise because it seems to ramp up competitors with rivals.

The newly-released fashions, generally known as Qwen 2.5, are designed to be used in functions and sectors starting from cars to gaming and science analysis, Alibaba stated. They’ve extra superior capabilities in math and coding, it added.

The Hangzhou-headquartered agency is trying to enhance competitors with home rivals reminiscent of Baidu and Huawei, in addition to U.S. titans like Microsoft and OpenAI.

AI fashions are skilled on big quantities of information. Alibaba says its fashions have the abiltiy to know prompts and generate texts and pictures.

Open-source signifies that anybody — together with researchers, teachers and corporations — around the globe can use the fashions to create their very own generative AI apps without having to coach their very own programs, saving time and expense. By open sourcing the fashions, Alibaba hopes extra customers will use its AI.

The Chinese language e-commerce big first launched its Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen, mannequin final yr. Since then, it has launched improved variations and says that, up to now, its open supply fashions have been downloaded 40 million occasions.

The corporate additionally stated that it upgraded its proprietary flagship mannequin known as Qwen-Max, which isn’t open-source. As an alternative, Alibaba sells its capabilites by way of its cloud computing merchandise to companies. Alibaba stated that Qwen Max 2.5-Max surpassed rivals reminiscent of Meta‘s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT4 in a number of areas inclduing reasoning and language comprehension.

Alibaba additionally launched a brand new text-to-video software based mostly on its AI fashions. This permits customers to enter a immediate and the AI will create a video based mostly on it. That is just like OpenAI’s Sora.

“Alibaba Cloud is investing, with unprecedented depth, within the analysis and improvement of AI expertise and the constructing of its world infrastructure,” Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba, stated in an announcement.

Wu, who took over the position of CEO at Alibaba final yr amid a historic reshuffle, has been making an attempt to reinvigorate progress on the tech big, because it faces headwinds together with rising competitors and a sluggish Chinese language client.

Alibaba is without doubt one of the largest cloud computing gamers in China, however internationally, it trails the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. The corporate is hoping that its newest AI choices could tempt prospects inside and outdoors of China to enroll to its cloud providers, boosting a division which has been sluggish however confirmed early signal of an acceleration within the June quarter.