By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 19th, 2024
Public testing of Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen is now underway in China as the company hopes to finetune the AI and fully release it later.
Alibaba has started rolling out Tongyi Qianwen, an artificial intelligence model application that will rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Tongyi Qianwen is a large language model (LLM) Alibaba intends to integrate with a digital assistant named Tongyi Tingwu.
According to Alibaba, Tongyi Tingwu is an AI assistant offering users a wide range of services, including multimedia content analysis. Alibaba also says Tongyi Tingwu will let users generate a text summary of uploaded audio or video content.
Alibaba Cloud, a major Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd (HKG: 9988) is in charge of Tongyi Qianwen and has released the ChatGPT rival for public testing. Alibaba says it will initially integrate the LLM with DingTalk, Alibaba’s enterprise communication and collaboration platform.
In a press release, Alibaba specified that simplifying multimedia content is now necessary because of the high volume of this content available every day. Alibaba Cloud Intelligence CTO Jingren Zhou said:
“We live at a time when a growing amount of video and audio content is being consumed in various formats every day. In line with this, Tongyi Tingwu aims to use the large language model to facilitate faster and better comprehension and easier sharing of multimedia content.”
“Tongyi Qianwen” is traceable to Chinese Confucian philosopher Mencius, and translates to “Truth from a Thousand Questions”.
Alibaba will Continue to Finetune Tongyi Qianwen
Alibaba will continue fixing its AI to improve its services and perform better than the competition. For instance, Alibaba plans that later this year, Tongyi Qianwen will provide real-time multimedia content translation between Chinese and English. The company will release this feature as a plugin on Google Chrome. In addition, CNBC has referenced an Alibaba spokesperson confirming that the company will build specific products tailored to corporate cloud customers.
The Chinese conglomerate hopes that the public testing will help advance AI and feed it more information. Alibaba already has a large user base across several services, including e-commerce platforms Alibaba.com and Taobao. Alibaba wants users to report their findings as they continue to improve AI.
Artificial Intelligence Services in China
Since ChatGPT launched late last year, several companies have joined the race to create the first major and widely-accepted rival. While the race may not see a significant victor anytime soon, some of the world’s largest tech companies are working tirelessly.
In China, multinational tech giant Baidu unveiled its own AI chatbot called the ERNIE Bot. Although Ernie is not fully ready, Baidu revealed ERNIE to interested partners in response to demand. Baidu’s bot uses its own ERNIE LLM, set to serve more than 650 companies that have already signed up. Baidu also says that over 120,000 companies have expressed interest in ERNIE, which is usable for several functions, such as in self-driving cars and smart devices. Recently, Baidu CEO Robin Li said on a call with analysts that the company is awaiting regulatory approval.
ERNIE is an acronym for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration.