Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and
intelligence backbone of
Alibaba Group, today unveiled its latest large language
model, Tongyi Qianwen. The
new AI model will be integrated across
Alibaba’s various businesses to improve user experience in the near future. The company’s customers and developers will have access to the
model to create customised
AI features in a cost-effective way.
Alibaba Cloud also announced lower cost options for key
cloud products, including their Elastic Compute Service (ECS) and Object Storage Service (OSS), by introducing
new ECS instances, OSS Reserved Capacity (OSS-RC) and OSS Anywhere Reserved Capacity (OSS-ARC). The move will make computing more accessible and affordable for companies looking to unlock emerging opportunities in the
new AI era in China.
“We are at a technological watershed moment driven by generative
AI and
cloud computing, and businesses across all sectors have started to embrace
intelligence transformation to stay ahead of the game,” said
Daniel Zhang, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “As a leading global
cloud computing service provider,
Alibaba Cloud is committed to making computing and
AI services more accessible and inclusive for
enterprises and developers, enabling them to uncover more insights, explore
new business models for growth, and create more cutting-edge products and services for society.”
Integrating Tongyi Qianwen into
Alibaba’s businesses and building tailored models with customers
Tongyi Qianwen (通义千问 in Chinese) will be integrated into all business applications across
Alibaba’s ecosystem in the near future to further enhance user experience, from enterprise communication, intelligent voice assistance, e-commerce, search, to navigation and entertainment. With Chinese and English language capabilities, the
model will first be deployed on DingTalk,
Alibaba’s digital collaboration workplace and application development platform, and Tmall Genie, a provider of IoT-enabled smart home appliances.
- Tongyi Qianwen-powered DingTalk is designed to make workplace communications more efficient. For example, it can summarise meeting notes, turn meeting conversations into text, write emails, and draft business proposals or promotion campaign plans through simple prompts. Users can instantly create a mini application on DingTalk by photographing a draft idea written on paper.
- Tongyi Qianwen-powered Tmall Genie will be able to engage in more dynamic and vivid conversations with users in China. For instance, it can develop and tell stories to children, provide healthy diet recipes, offer travel tips and recommend background music for a workout.
To further enable
enterprises to reap the benefits of
AI-driven innovation,
Alibaba Cloud will offer its clients access to Tongyi Qianwen on the
cloud and help them build customised large language models. By fine-tuning Tongyi Qianwen with customers’ proprietary
intelligence and industrial know-how in a secure
cloud environment,
enterprises can establish tailored
AI models to suit their specific business needs. This is expected to spark a
new wave of growth momentum for customers, eliminating the need for resource-intensive and expensive pre-training processes for building foundational models. Tongyi Qianwen is now available for general enterprise customers in China for beta testing.
In addition, developers will soon be able to access
Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qianwen to create their
AI applications at scale. This will further bolster the
AI software ecosystem across sectors ranging from logistics to media, finance, manufacturing, energy, retail and more. Tongyi Qianwen as an API is also available for developers in China to apply for beta testing now.
Multimodal capabilities, including image understanding and text-to-image, will soon be added to the Tongyi Qianwen
model to provide users with more compelling
AI features.
“Generative
AI powered by large language models is ushering in an unprecedented
new phase. In this latest
AI era, we can create additional value for our customers and broader communities through our resilient public
cloud infrastructure and proven
AI capabilities,” said
Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
“We are witnessing a
new paradigm of
AI development where
cloud and
AI models play an essential role. By making this paradigm more inclusive, we hope to facilitate businesses from all industries with their
intelligence transformation and, ultimately, help boost their business productivity, expand their expertise and capabilities while unlocking more exciting opportunities through innovations.”
Tongyi Qianwen is based on Tongyi,
Alibaba’s proprietary pre-trained
model framework that unifies various
AI models, including models that can turn text into images and short videos. Last year,
Alibaba Cloud launched ModelScope, an open-source
Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform with hundreds of
AI models, including a Tongyi-based text-to-image
model for global developers and researchers. So far, with over 1 million active users, ModelScope has made 800models available with over 16 million
model downloads to date.
More accessible and affordable computing for
enterprises and students
Designed for small and medium-sized (SME)
enterprises, the
new ECS Universal instance family provides the same stability of its similar product, while savingcosts of up to 40%. It is suitable for SMEs conducting web applications and websites, enterprise office applications and offline data analysis.
OSS-RC enables customers to reserve storage capacity in a specific region for one year. It reduces the capacity cost by up to 50% from pay-as-you-go prices. When customers have no requirement to store their data in a specific region, they can create an OSS “Anywhere Bucket” to store data in a region chosen by
Alibaba Cloud. OSS-ARC can then reserve capacity for objects stored in OSS Anywhere Buckets. It reduces the capacity cost by up to 70% from pay-as-you-go prices.
To make computing resources more accessible to developers in China,
Alibaba Cloud has also announced free trials of core products for up to three months, including ECS and PolarDB databases.
Alibaba Cloud will also provide 1,000 free training courses on
cloud technologies and around 500 hands-on experiments based on real business scenarios for developers to access
cloud technologies easily.
In addition,
Alibaba announced its
Cloud for Youth program is partnering with UNESCO Chair on Artificial
Intelligence in Education to bring more computing resources to students in China’s rural areas. Unveiled in 2021,
Alibaba’s non-profit
Cloud for Youth program helps to narrow the digital gap in China by providing
cloud computers to schools in underdeveloped areas. The goal is to help youths strengthen their technical foundation in digital capabilities and cultivate local digital talents.
