On August 28th, 2024, the Alibaba office building is located in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China.
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Alibaba Cloud launched its latest artificial intelligence models on Thursday with its Qwen series. The competition for large-scale language models in China continues to heat up following the “Deepseek moment.”
According to an announcement on the Alibaba Cloud website, the new “QWEN2.5-OMNI-7B” is a multimodal model.
The company says the model can be deployed on edge devices such as mobile phones, providing high efficiency without compromising performance.
“This unique combination provides the perfect foundation for developing agile, cost-effective AI agents that provide concrete values, especially intelligent voice applications,” Alibaba said.
For example, it can be used to help visually impaired people navigate the environment through real-time audio descriptions, the company added.
The new model is open-sole on a platform that embraces faces and Github, following the growth trend in China after Deepseek broke through open source for its R1 model.
Open source generally refers to software in which the source code is freely available on the web, and may be modified and redistributed. Over the past few years, Alibaba Cloud says that over 200 generation AI models have been open sawed.
Amidst the Chinese AI heat accelerated by Deepseek, Alibaba and other generation AI competitors are releasing new, cost-effective models and products at an unprecedented pace.
Last week, China’s technology giant Baidu We have released a new multimodal basic model and a model that focuses on its first inference.
Meanwhile, Alibaba debuted its updated Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model in late January, and released a new version of the AI assistant tool Quark earlier this month.
The company is strongly committed to its AI strategy, and last month announced plans to invest $53 billion in cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years, exceeding what it has spent on space over the past decade.
Kaiwan, Asia’s senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC that large Chinese engineers, such as Alibaba, who build data centers to meet AI computing needs in addition to building their own LLM, are well suited to benefit from China’s Deepseek AI boom.
Alibaba won a big victory in the AI business last month when it confirmed that the company was partnering. apple It will deploy AI integration for iPhones sold in China.
On Wednesday, the group also reported an expanded strategic partnership with BMW, accelerating the integration of the automaker into next-generation intelligent vehicles.
