Alibaba’s cloud unit now serves 80% of Chinese tech companies and half of country’s AI language model firms, group chairman Joe Tsai says
- Alibaba Cloud aims to turn AI into a huge productivity tool, ‘especially for small and medium-sized enterprises’, Tsai said at the Apsara Conference
- He also pointed out that Alibaba is the world’s first large-scale internet company to move all of its businesses to the cloud
“We aim to be the most open cloud in the era of AI,” he said. “We hope that through this cloud [platform], it will become easier and affordable for everyone to develop and use AI.”
Founded in 2009, Alibaba’s cloud services unit aimed “to make computing a public service like water and electricity” from the first line of code that it developed, Tsai said. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
The company described Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 as a generic LLM with “a few hundreds of billions of parameters” – a benchmark to measure an AI model’s power – that enables it to “successfully exceed some leading LLMs in benchmarks across domains ranging from language understanding and arithmetic problem solving to question-answering”.
LLMs are deep-learning AI algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate content using very large data sets.
“Large language models hold immense potential to revolutionise industries,” Alibaba Cloud chief technology officer Zhou Jingren said.
“We’re committed to using cutting-edge technologies, including generative AI, to help our customers capture the growth momentum forward,” Zhou said. “To help businesses better reap the benefits of generative AI in a cost-effective way, we are launching a more powerful foundation model, as well as industry-specific models to tackle domain-specific challenges.”
Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 is now accessible to the public via Alibaba Cloud’s website and mobile applications, and available for developers through application programming interfaces.
To cater to burgeoning demand for generative AI, Alibaba Cloud introduced at the conference its GenAI Service Platform, an all-in-one AI model-building platform designed to make it easier for companies in various industries to develop enterprise-specific AI models and applications, according to the company.