Alibaba releases the latest version of its large language model

Ali Baba Cloud said Thursday it released the latest version of its large language model after more than 90,000 deployments by companies.

Jingren Zhou, Alibaba Cloud’s chief technology officer, said in a statement that the firm has seen “many creative applications of the models from various industries,” including consumer electronics and gaming.

“We look forward to collaborating with our customers and developers in harnessing the vast
growth opportunities presented by the latest leap in generative AI development,” Zhou said.

Alibaba Cloud said the latest version of their Tongyi Qianwen model, Qwen2.5, possesses “remarkable advances in reasoning, code understanding and text understanding compared to its predecessor Qwen2.0.”

Big language models power AI applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. They are trained on massive amounts of data to generate human-like responses to user prompts.

The latest Qwen model does better than OpenAI’s GPT-4 model in terms of language and creation capabilities, but falls short in other categories such as knowledge, reasoning and mathematics, according to March analysis from the OpenCompass large language model evaluation platform.

Alibaba launched Tongyi Qianwen in April 2023 after ChatGPT took the world by storm after its launch in November 2022. An the updated version was released in October with improved abilities to understand complex instructions, write texts, reason, memorize and more.

Alibaba Cloud said more than 2.2 million enterprise users have accessed Qwen-based AI services such as DingTalk, Alibaba’s answer to Slack.

The firm also said it released a series of new Qwen models to the open source community and upgraded Model Studio, its generative AI platform, with new resources for AI development.

Other Chinese tech giants like Baidu and Tencent launched similar chatbots and AI models amid explosive demand for generative AI. Baidu in April said its Ernie bot had surpassed 200 million users after it was given the go-ahead for public use in August.

Generative AI is accelerating the development of humanoid robots in China, where these robots could help in factory work or labor.