Chinese tech giant Alibaba is opening up its artificial intelligence (AI) model to third-party developers to increase its usage and establish a leading role in technology. This move puts Alibaba in competition with Meta, a US tech giant that has also made its AI model available to developers. Alibaba’s large language model (LLM) called Tongyi Qianwen allows for AI content generation in English and Chinese and comes in different sizes. The company will be open-sourcing its seven-billion-parameter model called Qwen-7B, as well as a version designed for conversational apps called Qwen-7B-Chat. This allows researchers, academics, and companies globally to use the model for their generative AI apps without the need to train their systems. While Alibaba may not earn licensing fees from this, it will help the company gain more users for its AI model. Alibaba is looking to boost its cloud computing division through investments in AI, targeting it as a critical area for profitability and growth. Meta has already open-sourced its Llama large language model and is working with other tech firms to increase its adoption. Alibaba has not yet announced a partnership, but if its LLM gains success, it could be attractive for cloud providers to make it available to customers. Alibaba has already launched its own AI service called Tongyi Wanxiang, which can generate images from prompts.
