Over the past few months, the world’s two largest economies have been racing to showcase their AI capabilities. The new ChatGPT, Midjourney, Bing and others have captured tens of millions of users around the world. In China, entrepreneurs are racing to match their American counterparts. Baidu rolled out a ChatGPT equivalent, for example.
Today, another Chinese tech giant, Alibaba, unveiled its latest generative AI effort that is in some ways similar to Microsoft’s Copilot, which uses AI to facilitate the use of the giant’s suite of applications Allowing people to use natural language to describe what they want to build.
On Tuesday, Alibaba announced that its large language model, Tongyi Qianwen, will be integrated across the company’s business to improve user experience. Additionally, its customers and developers can create custom AI features by leveraging the model.
The Chinese e-commerce and cloud computing giant has a wide range of business lines ranging from food delivery, video streaming, e-commerce, and enterprise communications to flight booking. From the sound of Alibaba’s announcement, all of these services are basically ready for some AI disruption.
The company has already put natural language to use in two apps. In a pre-recorded demo, Alibaba showed how Slack-like chat app Dingtalk uses Tongyi Qianwen to summarize chat history, come up with company culture slogans, write meeting minutes, and turn handwritten diagrams into applets. Alibaba’s online premium retailer intelligent voice assistant, the announcement said LLM is also charging in Tmall Genie.
“We are at a technological watershed moment driven by generative AI and cloud computing, and companies across all sectors are beginning to embrace intelligent transformation to stay ahead of the game,” said Daniel Zhang, Chairman and CEO of the Alibaba Group and CEO of Alibaba Cloud. Intelligence in a statement.
“As a world-leading cloud computing service provider, Alibaba Cloud is committed to making computing and AI services more accessible and comprehensive for enterprises and developers, enabling them to reveal more insights, explore new business models for growth, and create more cutting-edge products and services for society.”
Users have yet to see or experience Alibaba’s full suite of AI-powered products, so it’s still too early to say how robust these upgraded services will be. But there are already some limitations to how AI can be used across online services.
On the same day that Alibaba announced its ambitious AI moves, China’s top internet watchdog released draft procedures to regulate how tech companies must serve users with generative AI models. The proposed rules were not surprising, mostly in line with previous regulations introduced to regulate other aspects of AI. For example, the new draft procedures require AI service providers to register their algorithms with the Internet Authority, verify users’ identities and keep a record of their data entry, such as AI claims.