On Tuesday, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd launched Tongyi Qianwen, an AI large language model similar to GPT that the company wants to integrate into all of its business applications in the near future. It will first be integrated into DingTalk, Alibaba’s workplace messaging app, and will be capable of summarizing meeting notes, writing emails, and drafting business proposals. Tmall Genie, Alibaba’s voice assistant, will also receive it.
“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,” CEO Daniel Zhang said in a statement. Alibaba’s stock surged 3% in early trading. Alibaba Cloud intends to make Tongyi Qianwen available to its customers so that they can create their own customized large language models.
Since the introduction of chatbot phenomenon ChatGPT by Microsoft-backed OpenAI late last year, there has been a boom in global interest in generative AI, which learns how to take actions from prior data to produce new material. Others, including Alphabet Inc’s Google and Baidu, have since marketed their AI models and developed comparable chatbots. Tongyi Qianwen is built on Tongyi, Alibaba’s proprietary pre-trained model platform that integrates many AI models.