The Chinese technology giant Alibaba’s cloud services division, Alibaba Cloud, stated on Tuesday that it was going to launch Tongyi Qianwen, a product that is similar to ChatGPT.
As stated in a press statement from the firm, Tongyi Qianwen, which can speak both Chinese and English, will firstly be used on DingTalk, Alibaba’s office communication software, and Tmall Genie, a seller of home automation equipment.
After the release, Alibaba’s stocks that are traded in Hong Kong increased by even more than 3%, though they have already given back a few of those profits. The Stock of Baidu fell 6 per cent in Hong Kong.
The firm announced at the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Conference that it would “the near future” implement an AI-powered chatbot into every Alibaba product, from e-commerce to corporate communication. A timeline was not made accessible.
“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, in a statement.
Alibaba initially revealed to CNBC in February that it was building a ChatGPT competitor.
“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,” the company said.
Tongyi Qianwen will be made available to customers of Alibaba Cloud, who may utilize it to create specialised large language models.
The bot will be “fine-tuned” with proprietary data and client information, saving these firms money and resources. Chinese enterprise users of Alibaba Cloud will have access to Tongyi Qianwen for beta testing.
“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,” said Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, in the release.
According to the firm, developers in China also can sign up for Tongyi Qianwen’s beta testing to develop their Ai technologies at scale.
Users should assume the Tongyi Qianwen model to shortly have “more compelling” AI capabilities like visual recognition and text-to-image.
After Baidu, Alibaba is the most recent Chinese firm to announce competitors to ChatGPT. Ernie Bot, a ChatGPT competitor from Baidu, was presented in March.
Chinese IT powerhouses like Alibaba, Baidu, and NetEase have all declared that they will be releasing products similar to ChatGPT.
As of 2018, International Data Corporation ranked Alibaba as the third-largest global supplier of public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
As per technology research group Gartner, the technology corporation also maintains the ranks of third-leading IaaS service provider worldwide and first-leading IaaS provider in Asia Pacific as of 2018.
Earlier, the much-awaited Ernie Bot chatbot from China’s Baidu was unveiled on Thursday last month, however, its usage of pre-recorded footage and the lack of a public launch let down investors and caused its shares to crash.
The protest, which usually lasts now over an hour and came two days after Alphabet Inc.’s Google finally revealed a flurry of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for its cloud, collaboration, and e-mail applications, gave the audience a small glimpse of what may end up being China’s biggest rival to the ChatGPT system developed by the American research centre OpenAI.
But, in contrast to ChatGPT, which had become accessible to everybody as a freemium chatbot last November, Baidu’s presentation only included a few brief videos of Ernie executing mathematical operations, speaking in Chinese dialects, and generating footage and a picture in response to text inputs.
