Alibaba Launches Latest Version Of Its AI Model To Compete With Microsoft, Amazon

Alibaba has launched the latest version of its AI (artificial intelligence) model in a bid to compete with American tech behemoths like Microsoft and Amazon.

To recap, Alibaba unveiled its ChatGPT-like AI model dubbed Tongyi Qianwen earlier this year. Now, the Chinese technology company has announced its latest large language model called Tongyi Qianwen 2.0.

To those unaware, an LLM forms the basis for generative AI applications like ChatGPT and it is trained on a vast amount of data. According to Alibaba, Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 is a "substantial upgrade from its predecessor".

Furthermore, Alibaba's cloud computing arm claims the new model has "hundreds of billions of" parameters, which are used to measure AI model power. So, it is safe to say that Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 is one of the world's most powerful AI models by that metric.

For comparison, Tencent's Hunyuan AI has over 100 billion parameters. Meanwhile, Microsoft's GPT-3 AI model has 175 billion parameters. Meta's Llama 2 model, on the other hand, has 70 billion parameters.

What can Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 do?

A blog post published on the Alibaba Cloud Community website claims that Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 "demonstrates remarkable capabilities in understanding complex instructions, copywriting, reasoning, memorising, and preventing hallucinations".

Hallucinations allude to a concept where AI-powered bots present inaccurate information in a convincing way. Alibaba believes that its AI model will turn out to be useful in specific industries and uses, such as legal counselling and finance.

Notably, China's biggest cloud computing and e-commerce company has launched 8 entertainment and healthcare-centric AI models.

The original Tongyi Qianwen was used in two solutions including Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat. Alibaba says Qwen-VL is capable of responding to open-ended queries related to different images and generating picture captions.

Qwen-VL-Chat, on the other hand, is designed for "complex interactions" such as answering a series of questions or comparing multiple image inputs.

Alibaba GenAI Service Platform

It is also worth noting that Alibaba has announced the GenAI Service Platform that will enable companies to develop their own generative AI applications, using their own data.

This offering will compete with the likes of Amazon Web Service's Bedrock and Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Studio.

One of the biggest fears that businesses have when it comes to using AI tools like ChatGPT is that the data could be accessed by third parties.

Major cloud players like Alibaba offer tools that enable companies to build their own generative AI products without relying on third-party data.

As part of the service package, these providers protect the companies' data as well. Despite being the biggest cloud player by market share in China, Alibaba is still trying to catch up with its US-based rivals like Amazon and Microsoft.

Meanwhile, another Chinese tech company, Baidu, recently unveiled the newest version of its generative AI Ernie Bot, which it claims is as good as OpenAI's latest model, GPT-4.