Alibaba Group Holding continues to make waves in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) with its self-developed large language models (LLMs), called Qwen. These LLMs have already gained popularity among Chinese corporate clients, with over 90,000 businesses adopting the technology. Qwen is being utilized across various industries, including consumer electronics, automotive, and online gaming, showcasing its versatility and broad appeal.
Zhou Jingren, the technology chief at Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba’s intelligent-computing arm, highlighted the success of Qwen at a recent company event. He remarked on the vast number of creative applications that have emerged from the use of these models, solidifying their value in the business world. Furthermore, Qwen-powered AI services are accessible to more than 2.2 million corporate users through Alibaba’s collaboration platform, DingTalk.
LLMs serve as the backbone for the next generation of AI tools, comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora. Ever since OpenAI introduced a cutting-edge language service in late 2022, several Chinese technology companies, including big players like Alibaba and Baidu, have been racing to develop and promote similar AI services. Alibaba released Qwen just a year after Baidu’s Ernie Bot, which is already being utilized by 85,000 corporate clients.
Alibaba’s continuous efforts to enhance its LLMs' capabilities have yielded impressive results, allowing clients to come up with innovative applications of AI. For example, Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi has integrated Qwen’s question-and-answer functionality into its smart assistant, Xiao Ai, which is present in their smartphones as well as their new SU7 electric vehicle. Additionally, Qwen supports new features in Xiaomi’s latest smartphone models, such as analyzing food images to generate corresponding recipes.
Perfect World Games, a prominent video game developer based in Beijing, is another major client leveraging the power of Qwen. By collaborating with Alibaba, the company is able to enhance its gaming experience and incorporate advanced AI capabilities into its products.
In an exciting announcement, Alibaba unveiled an upgraded version of its LLM, Tongyi Qianwen 2.5. The company claims that this new version outperforms OpenAI’s most advanced public model, GPT-4, in various Chinese capabilities. This achievement underscores Alibaba’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of language modeling technology.
Furthermore, Alibaba has made strides in open-sourcing its models, making them more accessible to the developer community. Among these releases is the Qwen1.5-110B, a Chinese open-source model trained with a staggering 110 billion parameters, making it one of the largest in the country. Models with a higher number of parameters are generally more complex, opening up possibilities for advanced AI applications.
Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen language models are revolutionizing AI in China, with their widespread adoption across industries and impressive capabilities. By constantly improving and expanding their LLMs, Alibaba is setting the standard for language modeling technology. With Qwen’s versatility and the company’s commitment to innovation, the possibilities for AI-driven applications seem endless in the Chinese tech landscape.
“Qwen is truly embraced by our enterprise customers and we have seen so many creative applications of the models from across the industries.” - Zhou Jingren, Technology Chief at Alibaba Cloud
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