Alibaba Group Holding said its self-developed large language models (LLMs) have been adopted by more than 90,000 corporate clients, as it competes against rivals to draw users to its generative artificial intelligence (AI) services. Tongyi Qianwen, the company’s LLM series known also as Qwen, is used in industries ranging from consumer electronics to cars and online games, according to Zhou Jingren, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Alibaba Cloud, the intelligent-computing arm of Alibaba. Qwen “is truly embraced by our enterprise customers and we have seen so many creative applications of the models from across the industries”, Zhou said at a company event in Beijing. More than 2.2 million corporate users also have access to Qwen-powered AI services through DingTalk, Alibaba’s office collaboration platform.
LLM is the technology that underpins a new generation of AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora. Since the Microsoft-backed start-up unveiled its cutting-edge service in late 2022, Big Tech companies and smaller ventures in China have been scrambling to catch up by developing and promoting similar services. Alibaba launched Qwen a year ago, weeks after rival Baidu introduced its Ernie Bot, which is used by 85,000 corporate clients, according to Founder and CEO Robin Li Yanhong.
Alibaba’s Zhou said the company’s efforts to enhance its LLMs’ capabilities have enabled clients to come up with innovative applications of AI. Chinese smartphone firm Xiaomi has integrated Qwen’s question-and-answer functionality into its smart assistant Xiao Ai, which is used across its handsets and new SU7 electric vehicle, according to Alibaba. Qwen also supports new features in Xiaomi’s latest smartphone models, including the ability to analyze images of food and generate corresponding recipes, Alibaba said. Other major Qwen clients include Beijing-based video game developer Perfect World Games.
Alibaba last week unveiled an updated version of its LLM, Tongyi Qianwen 2.5, which the company said performs better in Chinese than GPT-4, which is OpenAI’s most advanced model open to the public. The Hangzhou-based company also launched several open-source models, including Qwen 1.5-110B, which was trained with 110 billion parameters, making it one of the largest Chinese open-source models. Most mainstream Chinese open-source models have been trained with 7 billion to 14 billion parameters, the South China Morning Post reports.
