Alibaba¶

Alibaba is one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world and one of the largest investors in artificial intelligence in China. Alibaba has made significant progress in areas such as machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing, possessing world-leading technological capabilities. Its AI products have been widely applied in fields like smart finance, smart logistics, and smart cities.

Not only is Alibaba developing its own LLM products like Tongyi Qianwen, but it is also continuously investing and acquiring top unicorns in the LLM sector: Zhiyu AI, Baichuan Intelligence, The Dark Side of the Moon, Zero One Everything, and Minimax.

In fact, as early as 2015, Alibaba Cloud began launching AI products applicable to various fields such as speech recognition, image recognition, and visual recognition.

Subsequently, Alibaba invested in and acquired stakes in several AI companies including Deep Vision Technology, Cambricon, SenseTime, Megvii, and Yitu Technology, venturing into more core technology areas and addressing Alibaba's shortcomings in AI visual recognition.

In early 2020, Alibaba's Damo Academy launched the Chinese multimodal pre-training model M6 project, releasing a basic model with 300 million parameters in June of the same year. By January 2021, the model's parameter scale reached 10 billion, making it the largest Chinese multimodal model in the world. In May 2021, a model with a trillion parameters was officially put into use, keeping pace with Google's development. In October 2020, the parameter scale of M6 was expanded to 10 trillion, becoming the world's largest AI pre-training model at that time.

In April 2023, Alibaba Cloud's CTO Zhou Jingren officially announced the launch of the ultra-large-scale AI model "Tongyi Qianwen," which features capabilities such as multi-turn chat, content creation, logical reasoning, multimodal understanding, and multilingual support. Then-CEO of Alibaba Cloud Zhang Yong stated that all of Alibaba's products would be integrated with the "Tongyi Qianwen" model for comprehensive transformation, including Tmall, DingTalk, Amap, Taobao, Youku, and Hema.

In October 2023, Alibaba Cloud officially released the billion-parameter model Tongyi Qianwen 2.0, along with eight industry-specific models trained based on the Tongyi LLM and a one-stop LLM application development platform, Alibaba Cloud Bailian, and Alibaba AI Platform PAI. It was revealed that over 30 cloud products on Alibaba Cloud have integrated LLM capabilities. Alibaba Cloud claims that the overall performance of Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 exceeds that of GPT-3.5 and is accelerating towards catching up with GPT-4.

Looking to the future, "Cloud + AI" is the foundation supporting innovative development. Alibaba will continue to focus on national technology strategies, increasing investments in technology, talent, and funding, continuously enhancing the foundational service capabilities of AI, and expanding the boundaries of open-source collaboration.

Overall, Alibaba Group is increasing its investment in the AI sector and recently emphasized its commitment to continuously investing in China's generative AI field to achieve a leading position.