Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, will soon integrate Tongyi Qianwen, its latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model, into its ecosystem.

Alibaba Cloud customers and developers soon will have access to the Tongyi Qianwen model so they can create and customize AI features more cost-effectively.

“We are at a technological watershed moment driven by generative AI and cloud computing, and businesses across all sectors have started to embrace intelligence transformation to stay ahead of the game,” said Daniel Zhang, chair and CEO of Alibaba Group and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

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Tongyi Qianwen is based on Tongyi, Alibaba’s proprietary pre-trained model framework that unifies various AI models, including models that can turn text into images and short videos.

AI features

Tongyi Qianwen will be integrated into all business applications across Alibaba’s ecosystem in the near future to further enhance user experience, from enterprise communication, intelligent voice assistance, e-commerce, search, to navigation and entertainment. 

Multimodal capabilities, including image understanding and text-to-image, will soon be added to the Tongyi Qianwen model to provide users with more compelling AI features.

With Chinese and English language capabilities, the model will first be deployed on DingTalk, Alibaba’s digital collaboration workplace and application development platform, and Tmall Genie, a provider of IoT-enabled smart home appliances.

The new AI model can summarize meeting notes, turn meeting conversations into text, write emails, and draft business proposals or promotion campaign plans through simple prompts. Users can instantly create a mini application on DingTalk by photographing a draft idea written on paper.

Generative AI

Tmall Genie will be able to engage in more dynamic and vivid conversations with users in China. It can develop and tell stories to children, provide healthy diet recipes, offer travel tips, and recommend background music for a workout.

To further enable enterprises to reap the benefits of AI-driven innovation, Alibaba Cloud will offer its clients access to Tongyi Qianwen on the cloud and help them build customized large language models. 

Developers will soon be able to access it to create their AI applications at scale. Tongyi Qianwen as an API is also available for developers in China to apply for beta testing now.

“Generative AI powered by large language models is ushering in an unprecedented new phase. In this latest AI era, we can create additional value for our customers and broader communities through our resilient public cloud infrastructure and proven AI capabilities,” said Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.