Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing and data intelligence subsidiary of Alibaba Group, has announced the launch of its latest large language model, Tongyi Qianwen, which is expected to support enterprises in their intelligence transformation journey. The new AI model will be integrated across Alibaba's various businesses to enhance user experience, and will also be made available to customers and developers, enabling them to create customised AI features in a cost-effective manner.
According to Daniel Zhang, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group, the company is committed to making computing and AI services more accessible and inclusive for enterprises and developers, enabling them to uncover more insights, explore new business models for growth, and create more cutting-edge products and services for society.
Tongyi Qianwen will be integrated into all business applications across Alibaba's ecosystem in the near future to further enhance user experience, from enterprise communication, intelligent voice assistance, e-commerce, search, to navigation and entertainment. With Chinese and English language capabilities, the model will first be deployed on DingTalk, Alibaba's digital collaboration workplace and application development platform, and Tmall Genie, a provider of IoT-enabled smart home appliances.
Tongyi Qianwen-powered DingTalk is designed to make workplace communications more efficient. For example, it can summarize meeting notes, turn meeting conversations into text, write emails, and draft business proposals or promotion campaign plans through simple prompts. Users can instantly create a mini application on DingTalk by photographing a draft idea written on paper.
Tongyi Qianwen-powered Tmall Genie will be able to engage in more dynamic and vivid conversations with users in China. For instance, it can develop and tell stories to children, provide healthy diet recipes, offer travel tips and recommend background music for a workout.
To further enable enterprises to reap the benefits of AI-driven innovation, Alibaba Cloud will offer its clients access to Tongyi Qianwen on the cloud and help them build customized large language models. By fine-tuning Tongyi Qianwen with customers' proprietary intelligence and industrial know-how in a secure cloud environment, enterprises can establish tailored AI models to suit their specific business needs. This is expected to spark a new wave of growth momentum for customers, eliminating the need for resource-intensive and expensive pre-training processes for building foundational models. Tongyi Qianwen is now available for general enterprise customers in China for beta testing.
Developers will also be able to access Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Qianwen to create their AI applications at scale. This will further bolster the AI software ecosystem across sectors ranging from logistics to media, finance, manufacturing, energy, retail and more. Tongyi Qianwen as an API is also available for developers in China to apply for beta testing now.
Multimodal capabilities, including image understanding and text-to-image, will soon be added to the Tongyi Qianwen model to provide users with more compelling AI features.
Tongyi Qianwen is based on Tongyi, Alibaba's proprietary pre-trained model framework that unifies various AI models, including models that can turn text into images and short videos. Last year, Alibaba Cloud launched ModelScope, an open-source Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform with hundreds of AI models, including a Tongyi-based text-to-image model for global developers and researchers. So far, with over 1 million active users, ModelScope has made 800 models available with over 16 million model downloads to date.
