Ali Baba

Alibaba Group Holding Co. has become the latest Chinese tech company to respond to AI-powered chat app ChatGPT, amid a race to create a local competitor to the successful OpenAI chatbot.

Alibaba Cloud, the group’s cloud computing company, released the service, dubbed “Dongqi Qianwen,” on Friday through its official WeChat account, and also opened the chatbot for invite-only beta testing to enterprise customers.

The chatbot’s terms of use link its development to Damo Academy — Alibaba’s internal scientific research group — and in February the e-commerce giant confirmed its research institute was working on an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

Damo Academy first introduced its language for developing artificial intelligence, known as LLM, called “Alice Mind” last September, as revealed by its vice president Cho Jingren at the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He described it as a pre-trained multimedia model capable of processing various types of input, including text, images, audio and video, according to Yahoo Finance, and reviewed by Al Arabiya.net.

A board member of a company that launched AliceMind suggested that the language model could be used in a variety of fields, including e-commerce, smart cities, healthcare, agriculture, smartphone imaging, autonomous driving and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Damo previously said that LLM is already being used by customers and in hundreds of internal use cases, including integration with Taobao.

Trained by machine learning, LLMs are the basis for AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, which allow them to answer complex questions and generate detailed scripts, code or other content. While China is the world leader in some areas of artificial intelligence, the United States produced more than half of the world’s largest language and multimedia models last year, according to Stanford University’s latest AI Index report.

Few on social media have yet tested Tongyi Qianwen, but some have already posted comparisons with Ernie Bot from Baidu and ChatGPT from OpenAI.

The launch of Alibaba’s ChatGPT-like service comes just weeks after rival Baidu released Ernie Bot.

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