Alibaba rolls out latest version of its large language model to meet robust AI demand

On Thursday, Alibaba Cloud announced the latest edition of its big language model, following over 90,000 deployments by organizations.

Alibaba Cloud’s chief technology officer, Jingren Zhou, said in a statement that the company has seen “many creative applications of the models from across the industries,” including consumer electronics and gaming.

“We look forward to collaborating with our customers and developers in seizing the immense growth opportunities presented by the latest surge in the generative AI development,” stated Zhou.

Alibaba Cloud stated that the current version of its Tongyi Qianwen model, Qwen2.5, had “remarkable advancements in reasoning, code comprehension, and textual understanding compared to its predecessor Qwen2.0.”

Large language models drive artificial intelligence applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. They are trained using massive volumes of data to produce human-like responses to user prompts.

According to a March examination by big language model evaluation platform OpenCompass, the current Qwen model outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 model in language and creativity capabilities but falling short in other categories such as knowledge, logic, and math.

Alibaba released Tongyi Qianwen in April 2023, following the global success of ChatGPT in November 2022. In October, an enhanced version was published, which increased capabilities such as interpreting difficult instructions, scripting, thinking, and memorization.

Alibaba Cloud reported that over 2.2 million business customers have used Qwen-powered AI services such as DingTalk, Alibaba’s answer to Slack.

The company also announced that it has released a number of new Qwen models to the open-source community and improved Model Studio, its generative AI platform, with new AI development resources.

Chinese tech titans, like Baidu and Tencent, have created comparable chatbots and AI models to meet growing demand for generative AI. Baidu announced in April that its Ernie bot had surpassed 200 million users since it was approved for general usage last August.

Generative AI is driving the development of humanoid robots in China, where they could assist with manufacturing work or labor.