A formal launch of the AI tool is expected at the Alibaba Cloud event on Tuesday.
Chinese multinational technology major Alibaba Group Holding Limited is inviting businesses to test its artificial intelligence tool, according to a Reuters report that cited STAR Market Daily. Alibaba’s move comes amid a rush among various tech companies across the globe to emulate the success of OpenAI’s massively popular AI bot ChatGPT.
The tech company’s cloud computing unit is giving invitation codes to some corporate customers to try its large language model, or LLM, called Tongyi Qianwen, according to a Bloomberg report, which cited an announcement on its official WeChat account. The report highlighted that the tool could be mainly used to process queries in Alibaba’s home language as its Cloud website service is only in Chinese.
According to the Reuters report, the Daniel Zhang-led company’s cloud computing division published a teaser on Friday that read “Hello, my name is Tongyi Qianwen, this is our first time meeting, I welcome your feedback.” The company’s chief executive officer Zhang will speak at the Alibaba Cloud event on Tuesday and a formal launch of the AI tool is expected on the same day.
Meanwhile, the AI race has intensified after OpenAI’s ChatGPT came into the limelight since its launch in November last year. Short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, ChatGPT is a popular AI text generator and has been a center of attention for many due to its human-like response. Several other tech giants, including Google and Baidu, have also started investing heavily in the segment.
Google announced Bard in February as a competition to ChatGPT. Bard offers similar capabilities to the OpenAI’s chatbot, such as writing essays, planning events, creating travel itineraries, and suggesting dinner recipes. Baidu, on the other hand, unveiled its chatbot Ernie on March 16 and it also offers similar features like mathematical logic reasoning, summarizing financial statements, producing PowerPoint presentations, and preparing travel itineraries, among others.
