To The Moon

BEIJING, April 4 (TMTPOST)— Another Chinese internet giant will unveil its large language model (LLM) like OpenAI's wildly popular ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversational bot.

Source: Visual China

Alibaba Group will release a large AI model at Alibaba Cloud Summit on April 11 and the model for  industrial application a week later, namely, on April 18, Qianjiang Evening News, a popular daily newspaper owned by the provincial government-backed Zhejiang Daily Newspapers Group, learned from people in the industry on Tuesday. However, insiders at Alibaba Cloud said they had no idea about such new launch. “We don’t have anything to announce”, some of them told the paper. Others said everything was subject to announcement.

The paper noted a blogger tested the smart assistant app Tmall genie and found it had upgraded to a ChatGPT-like version. The app was said to answer 15 questions from the blogger and reactions to ten out of them were better than peers. "This is a beta version. Tmall Genie has indeed integrated into large model products," an Alibaba insider confirmed to the paper, adding that the large model products have been integrated across various lineups within Alibaba, and the performance is amazing during the internal test under way.

Earlier this week, Alibaba Cloud unit just confirmed it would host 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit an event in China National Convention Center in Beijing on April 11. The event will feature insights on innovation,circling around new and exciting ideas: how cloud computing as infrastructure benefits industries and the public, as well as our partners; and how data intelligence drives digital transformation to new business models, according the unit. Participates inside Alibaba include some of senior officials, such as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Daniel Zhang, Zhou Jingren, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, Selina Yuan, Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group International Business Unit, Cai Yinghua, Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Global Sales of Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba is one of Chinese tech firms that are most likely to make AI breakthrough following Baidu. In the beginning of February, Baidu confirmed launch of ChatGPT-style Ernie Bot and said the chatbot is set to be available for the public when it ends internal testing in March. Days after the announcement, news about Alibaba’s ChatGPT-like application labeled “pre-release” was circulated online. Alibaba is actually developing such product and it has entered into the stage of internal testing, an insider at the company later confirmed to Shanghai Securities Journal, the state-owned national newspaper. Name of the app has not been finalized yet, the person added.

Baidu officially launched Ernie Bot on March 16, a day after OpenAI released the multimodal pre-training large model GPT-4. Ernie Bot is able to generate texts and integrate other capabilities of Baidu in the field of AI, such as the ability to create pictures, and the ability to automatically generate videos according to the copywriting, which can generate content with pictures. Baidu CEO Robin Li admitted that Ernie Bot's understanding of English and processing ability are not as good as Chinese. Part of the reason is that the training data sample is not large enough.