Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has announced the launch of Tongyi Qianwen, its new AI language model. This model, similar to GPT, will be integrated into all of Alibaba’s business applications in the near future. It will first be added to DingTalk, Alibaba’s workplace messaging app, to summarize meeting notes, write emails, and draft business proposals. Additionally, the language model will be added to Tmall Genie, Alibaba’s voice assistant, and made available to Alibaba Cloud clients to build their own customized large language models.
Tongyi Qianwen is based on Tongyi, Alibaba’s proprietary pre-trained model framework that unifies various AI models. The integration of an AI language model into Alibaba’s business applications highlights the growing importance of artificial intelligence in business operations. With Tongyi Qianwen, Alibaba aims to compete with US rivals such as OpenAI, Microsoft Bing chatbot, and Google Bard.
Earlier this year, Alibaba was reported to be developing a ChatGPT rival. The company stated that the development of the new large language model AI started in 2017 and was being tested internally before the public launch.