Alibaba launches open-source AI to tackle Meta – 8/3/2023 – Tech

The cloud computing unit of Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group launched two open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models on Thursday in a bid to take on Meta Platform.

The company on Thursday released two LLM (large language models), a type of AI model, named Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat.

Each model has 7 billion parameters, which is often used to measure the strength of these systems. This is the first time that a major Chinese technology company has released its LLM in open source.

This also comes after Meta unveiled a similar open-source model called the Llama 2 last month. Some analysts said open source models could reduce the current market dominance enjoyed by OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT, and Google, whose AI models charge users expensive fees.

Alibaba Cloud announced its LLM called Tongyi Qianwen in April, which comes with multiple versions with different numbers of parameters. Alibaba said that Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat are two small-sized versions of Tongyi Qianwen, which aim to help small and medium-sized businesses get started with AI.

The “code, model weights, and documentation for the two models will be freely accessible to academics, researchers, and commercial institutions worldwide,” the company said.

However, for companies with more than 100 million monthly active users, they will need to obtain a license from Alibaba before using both models. Similarly, Meta’s Llama 2 also requires a user license with over 700 million users.

Alibaba said Tongyi Qianwen has versions with a larger number of parameters that have not been opened, but did not say how many parameters its larger model contains. The biggest version of Llama 2 features 70 billion parameters.

China has been trying to catch up with the US in the field of AI. Beijing has been encouraging Chinese companies to rapidly develop local, “controllable” AI models that can rival those developed by US companies.

In addition to Alibaba, tech giants like Tencent Holdings and Huawei have been developing their own AI models in recent months.