Alibaba embeds own ChatGPT-style service to workplace communications app DingTalk, heating up competition in China’s AI tools market

Powered by Alibaba’s own large language model Tongyi Qianwen, DingTalk is now able to compose articles and generate posts based on simple user prompts
This latest initiative underscores how Chinese technology firms are stepping up their development of competitive generative AI tools

Alibaba

Coco Fengin Beijing

Published: 6:00pm, 18 Apr 2023

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Alibaba Group Holding has integrated its own ChatGPT-style service to DingTalk, the e-commerce giant’s enterprise collaboration app, to make workplace communications more efficient, highlighting Chinese Big Tech companies’ efforts to deliver a range of artificial intelligence (AI) offerings to market.

Powered by Alibaba’s own large language model (LLM) Tongyi Qianwen, DingTalk is now able to compose articles and generate posts based on simple user prompts, said DingTalk president Ye Jun at a live demonstration of the enhanced enterprise communications platform on Tuesday in Beijing.

The app can also summarise previous conversations in a group chat when a new member is added to the thread. In addition, it can help make conversations livelier by generating stickers based on text prompts.

This latest initiative by Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, underscores how Chinese technology firms are stepping up their development of competitive generative AI tools, following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT service in November last year. Generative AI refers to software that can create new text, images or video based on prompts from a user.

DingTalk is an enterprise communications and collaboration app developed by Alibaba Group Holding. Photo: Shutterstock

While Alibaba has been doing research on LLMs for a number of years, the live demonstration on Tuesday of the enhanced DingTalk app showed that the company’s efforts in this field are still at an early stage. LLMs refer to a type of AI that uses deep-learning techniques and massively large data to understand, summarise, generate and predict new content.

When prompted for a sticker based on futangdaohuo, the Chinese idiom for going through difficulties that literally translates as treading on hot water and fire, DingTalk initially generated a drawing of a head containing boiling soup. DingTalk president Ye asked the platform to redo the sticker twice, which yielded unsatisfactory results. He later said the app “will get better with more training”.

Although ChatGPT creator OpenAI is a leading player in this field, Ye said Alibaba has its “unique advantages, including cloud computing and diverse application scenarios”. For example, around half of more than 2,000 first-class hospitals in China are using DingTalk for work collaboration, he said.

After DingTalk, Tongyi Qianwen is also expected to be integrated into Tmall Genie, Alibaba’s Internet of Things-enabled smart home appliance, the company said last week.

Alibaba launches its own ChatGPT rival, following Baidu’s chatbot

Competition among Chinese tech giants in ChatGPT-like services is now heating up. On Tuesday, TikTok owner ByteDance launched its updated cloud-based, machine-learning platform that can help train LLMs with extremely low latency.

Baidu, which was the first Chinese Big Tech firm to unveil a ChatGPT-like service with Ernie Bot last month, said on Tuesday that the technology will be integrated into its internal smart work platform, InfoFlow, that is accessible to all employees.

Tencent Holdings’ cloud unit last week launched its next-generation high-performance computing cluster that “provides computational power for training LLMs and self-driving technologies with high bandwidth and low latency”.

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