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Alibaba launched ChatGPT rival, Tongyi Qianwen

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Ankita

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Alibaba Group Holding Ltd recently made an announcement about the launch of their AI language model Tongyi Qianwen, a rival to OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. Alibaba is the second Chinese company to launch a large language model of its own after Baidu’s LLM Ernie Bot. The model plans to allow integration into other business applications in the future to enhance user experiences. 

Alibaba launched ChatGPT rival, Tongyi Qianwen

Key Points:

  • Alibaba launched its own version of a large language model called Tongyi Qianwen, a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT becoming the second Chinese company to launch LLM of its own. 
  • Baidu’s Ernie Bot was the first Chinese company to create its own large language model.
  • Tongyi Qianwen will allow users to converse in two languages: Chinese and English. 

What is Tongyi Qianwen?

Tongyi Qianwen is a large language model developed by Alibaba, which is similar to OpenAI’s GPT. This LLM will be added to DingTalk, a messaging app in Alibaba’s workplace. The company has reported it is capable of summarizing meeting notes, drafting business proposals, and writing emails on the user’s behalf, making communication more efficient in the workplace.  

In the future, the language model will be added to more applications such as Tmall Genie, which is Alibaba’s voice assistant tool that will work similarly to Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri. 

Tongyi Qianwen was based on a proprietary pre-trained model structure that unites several Artificial intelligence models. 

Soon Tongyi Qianwen will be integrated into business applications across the ecosystem in Alibaba to enhance its functionality by adding voice assistance, e-commerce, enterprise communication, navigation, and more. 

There is also a possibility that Alibaba Cloud would be made available for its clients through which users will be able to generate their own large language models. 

The move to integrate AI language models into business applications helps reflect the growing importance of AI in business operations. With Tongyi Qianwen, Alibaba aims to take on competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard AI, and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. 

Alibaba first announced about developing a ChatGPT rival in February this year. It was reported that the company started the development of a new large language model in 2017 and had been testing internally before its public launch. 

Competition from Baidu and ChatGPT 

Baidu, a Chinese internet service and AI giant was announced last month as a competitor to ChatGPT called, Ernie Bot.

It was reported by the company that about 650 business partners had accessed the bot in its initial stage to help generate feedback from the users and improve the bot. 

OpenAI launched ChatGPT last year in November and since its release, ChatGPT has gained millions of subscribers and gained massive recognition worldwide. Last month, OpenAI released its advanced language model GPT-4, with a multimodal system that can help users generate prompts using texts and images. 

Users will be able to converse in Chinese and English with Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen. This makes Alibaba the second Chinese brand to build a large language model of its own. 

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