Alibaba has announced that it will be rolling out Tongyi Qianwen, its AI-powered chatbot that is expected to rival ChatGPT and serve the Chinese people.
Alibaba Cloud made the announcement on Tuesday, marking the Chinese tech giant’s grand entrance into the global AI race.
In a release, the company said Tongyi Qianwen will initially be deployed on DingTalk, Alibaba’s workplace communication software, and Tmall Genie, a provider of smart home appliances.
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Alibaba Cloud, the computing unit of the ecommerce giant Alibaba, joined other Chinese companies like Baidu seeking to develop a chatbot similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3. The companies sped up the pace following the frenzy created by ChatGPT 3 late last year.
But unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Alibaba Cloud intends to keep Tongyi Qianwen, which has the capability to speak English and Chinese, for streamlined use for now. The company said at the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit that it will be rolling out the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot into all Alibaba products from enterprise communication to e-commerce in the near future.
“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.
“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 customized AI features in a cost-effective way,” the company said.
Under the chatbot rollout plan, Alibaba Cloud will offer its clients access to Tongyi Qianwen on the cloud and help them build customized large language models.
Also, the chatbot will be fine-tuned with proprietary information and data from clients to reduce resources and costs for these companies. Alibaba Cloud’s enterprise customers in China will be able to access 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.
The company explained that developers in China can also apply for beta testing of Tongyi Qianwen to create their AI applications at scale. It added that users can expect more compelling AI features such as image understanding and text-to-image to be added to the Tongyi Qianwen model soon.
Baidu announced its chatbot dubbed ‘Ernie’, which has similar capabilities such as literary writing, business copywriting, algebra, Chinese culture, and multi-modal content generation with ChatGPT, in March.
The unavailability of ChatGPT in China has created the need for homemade chatbots that will have government’s backing. The world’s second largest economy is expected to launch more chatbots as the generative AI race heats up.
The Chinese companies are hoping to grab as much share as they can by joining the AI race early enough. But they still face regulatory hurdles from Beijing. For now, American OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, is leading the global AI race.