Tongyi Qianwen

History

2023

Start service for all

On September 13, 2023, the Chinese corporation Alibaba Group Holding announced that its chatbot Tongyi Qianwen based on artificial intelligence became available to everyone.

Alibaba Cloud Intelligence said that its own large language models (LLM) and AI applications based on Tongyi Qianwen intend to create and train many companies and organizations in the PRC. These include Oppo, Taobao, DingTalk and Zhejiang State University. The goal is to "enable any ordinary user and enterprise to benefit from LLM" - the technology that underpins smart chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Alibaba released an open analogue of ChatGPT

At the end of August 2023, the Chinese government lifted severe restrictions on local companies developing services based on generative AI. Several systems have been given the green light, including the Ernie Bot chatbot developed by the Chinese search corporation Baidu. Such applications should become an alternative to the aforementioned ChatGPT and Google Bard, access to which is officially prohibited in China. It is noted that the Chinese corporation Tencent Holdings, which owns such popular services in the country as Tencent QQ and WeChat, also launched its own model of artificial intelligence called Hunyuan.

Alibaba Group reportedly sees AI technology as a major strategic focus. The company intends to release its LLM in an open source version and make it available for free commercial use by the "entire community." This initiative should contribute to the emergence of new AI services and applications in the Chinese market. Alibaba believes that the introduction of AI will largely determine the success of the company in the future.^[1]

Product Announcement

On April 7, 2023, the Chinese corporation Alibaba Group Holding announced a chatbot called Tongyi Qianwen, a based system artificial intelligence designed to become an alternative. OpenAI ChatGPT

At first, corporate users will receive access to the Tongyi Qianwen service (roughly meaning "the truth of a thousand questions") by invitation as part of the testing program. Details regarding the functionality of the Alibaba platform do not go into detail. It is only noted that the bot produces information in response to user requests, and its purpose is to "generate ideas and increase performance" when performing certain tasks.

The Tongyi Qianwen service will be accessed by corporate users by invitation as part of the testing program

Tongyi Qianwen is based on a large language model (LLM). AI DAMO Academy (Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and) Outlook , a specialized technology center owned by Alibaba, took part in the creation of the system. As noted by The South China Morning Post, this division previously developed the AliceMind platform, a multimodal pre-trained language model capable of processing various types of input data, including text, images, audio materials and video. It was said that the technology can be used in a wide variety of areas, including e-commerce, smart city, health care agriculture, autonomous driving [[Internet and things Internet of Things ()|IoT [[Internet of Things (IoT)|Internet of Things (IoT)]]]]]]]]].

The announcement, unveiled by Alibaba's cloud division, reads: "Hello, my name is Tongyi Qianwen, this is our first meeting, I welcome your feedback." Corporate users who have already managed to try out the chatbot note that in terms of the concept of work it is comparable to Baidu Ernie Bot and OpenAI ChatGPT with minor differences.^[2]

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