Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, on Thursday unveiled the latest version of its Qwen 2.5 large language models powered by artificial intelligence . The move will help facilitate large-scale commercial applications of the rapidly advancing generative AI technology, according to industry experts.
The newly released open-source Qwen 2.5 models, which contain from 0.5 billion to 72 billion parameters, have advanced math and coding capabilities, support more than 29 languages, and are designed for a wide range of AI applications in various industries such as automotive, gaming, and scientific research, the company said.
“Alibaba Cloud is investing in AI research and development and building its global infrastructure with unprecedented intensity,” said Wu Yongming, CEO of Alibaba Group and chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, at the Apsara conference, Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship event.
According to Wu, large language model technologies have advanced rapidly, and they can now handle multimodal tasks including text, speech and vision, understand human requirements and perform complex programming tasks. At the same time, the cost of inferring information using LLM has decreased exponentially, he added.
“We continue to invest in advanced AI infrastructure to promote the widespread adoption of generative AI technologies across industries,” said Zhou Jingren, chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
According to Zhou, the release of Qwen 2.5 multimodal models bahamas email address will empower developers and enterprises of all sizes, increasing their ability to use AI technologies and spurring further growth of the open-source developer community. To date, Qwen models have been downloaded more than 40 million times since their debut in April 2023.
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Alibaba Cloud also announced an upgrade to its own flagship Qwen-Max model, saying its capabilities are now on par with those of US-based OpenAI's most advanced GPT-4o model.
The improved Qwen-Max model demonstrated high performance in various domains such as language comprehension, reasoning, mathematics and coding compared to other state-of-the-art models.
Alibaba Cloud Cuts Prices on Qwen Models
Charlie Dai, vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester, said: “As a pioneer in the Chinese public cloud market, Alibaba Cloud is making strategic investments in building end-to-end AI capabilities for modeling as a service, or MaaS, across core models, from infrastructure to applications.”
Dai noted that the latest product announcements demonstrate the company's strengths in R&D, adding that the open source release of LLM will greatly help enterprises and developers accelerate AI innovation by collaborating with other technology leaders in the cloud and AI ecosystem.
According to Lu Yanxia, research director at International Data Corp China, the continuous technological improvement of LLM will further promote the popularization of AI models and open up new business opportunities for domestic AI server, cloud computing and chip manufacturing companies.
Stressing that multimodal LLM is an indisputable direction for the future development of generative AI technology, Lu said that Chinese tech enterprises should devote more resources to improving computing power, algorithms and data quality to narrow the gap with the United States in the generative AI sector.
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Pan Helin, a member of the Expert Committee on Information and Communication Economy under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said LLMs are driving increased demand for data and knowledge in professional fields, as well as talents who can fine-tune specialized models to meet different industrial requirements.
Peng stressed that more efforts need to be made to expand the vertical industrial application of LLM to a wider range of industries.
Alibaba Cloud also introduced a new text-to-video model that can generate high-quality videos in a variety of visual styles based on Chinese and English text instructions and transform static images into dynamic videos.
The company announced an 85 percent price cut on the Qwen-Turbo LLM, while prices on two other LLM types were also reduced.
A report by McKinsey & Co, a global consulting firm, estimates that generative AI will add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion to the global economy annually, with a significant impact across all industries.
China news “Alibaba Cloud joins latest elite club of generative LLMs” prepared by PRC.TODAY Portal based on materials from China Daily website.
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