On Wednesday, Alibaba said it will offer its artificial intelligence model, Tongyi Qianwen, to the general public. This indicates that Alibaba has acquired the clearance of Chinese regulatory authorities to mass-market the model.
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes an increasingly prominent focus of rivalry between China and the United States, the authorities in China have lately increased their efforts to help enterprises develop AI.
According to a post that was published on the WeChat account of the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Division, the company has announced that several organizations, including OPPO, Taobao, DingTalk, and Zhejiang University, have reached cooperation agreements to either train their large language models or develop language model applications based on Tongyi Qianwen.
In addition, the article said that in the future, an open-source version of the broad language model will become accessible for free usage “by the whole society” in business settings.
Former Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang, also the head of the company’s Cloud business, resigned earlier this week. Eddie Wu, who had just been promoted to CEO of Alibaba Group, took his place.
On Tuesday, Wu sent a letter to the employees of Alibaba Group in which he said that artificial intelligence will be at the center of the company’s future strategy.
In the letter, Wu predicted that during the next decade, the disruptions brought about by AI across all industries would be the most major change agent.
If we do not adapt quickly enough to the changes that the age of AI brings, we shall be rendered obsolete.
Alibaba first introduced Tongyi Qianwen in April, and the company said that the artificial intelligence big language model, which is analogous to ChatGPT, will be included in all commercial apps.