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Chinese tech giant Alibaba has unveiled over 100 new open-source AI models and a text-to-video generation tool.
Announced at the company’s annual Apsara Conference on Thursday, September 19, the newly released models, collectively named Qwen 2.5, are designed to be used across multiple industries, including automotive, gaming, and scientific research.
According to Reuters, the new models range from 0.5 to 72 billion parameters and span a wide range of use cases, including language, audio, vision, coding, and mathematics.
The Chinese cloud giant also announced a new text-to-video generation tool that allows users to generate videos from text prompts, a capability similar to OpenAI’s Sora, Runway and Luna Labs Dream Machine.
Qwen-Max Upgrade
In addition to the open-source offerings, the company said it’s upgraded its flagship proprietary model, Qwen-Max, which is available through Alibaba’s cloud services. The tech giant claims Qwen-Max 2.5 outperforms rival models like Meta’s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT-4 in areas such as reasoning and language comprehension.
Alibaba’s latest AI move comes at a time when the global AI landscape is rapidly evolving, with many companies vying for dominance.
Last year, Alibaba made a huge mark on the generative AI scene when it launched Tongyi Wanxiang, an AI tool that can generate images from text prompts.
With over 100 open-source models and a text-to-video tool under its name, the company is positioning itself as a major player in the generative AI space, challenging the likes of OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Microsoft.
While the company is making moves in the AI space, it’s also reshuffling its global cloud computing infrastructure to support the growing demand for AI computing power. The company has also introduced a range of cloud products and services that include computing, networking, and data center architecture innovations.
Alibaba currently trails the likes of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in the global cloud computing market but leads in China with the likes of Huawei Cloud, Baidu AI Cloud and Tencent Cloud as its main competitors.
