Alibaba Cloud updates AI tools and infrastructure for developers

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud unit of Alibaba Group, has introduced new large language models, development tools, and upgraded infrastructure at its annual developer summit. 

“Alibaba Cloud is committed to delivering real value to global developers through cutting-edge AI models, enhanced cloud infrastructure, and accessible support programs,” Dongliang Guo, VP of International Business and head of International Products and Solutions at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said in the media release. “Together, we aim to spark more AI-driven innovations, benefiting startups, enterprises, and industries altogether across the globe.”

The Qwen model family, including the Qwen2.5 series with parameters ranging from 7 billion to 72 billion, is now accessible via APIs through Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio platform. Developers can also use multimodal models like Qwen-VL for vision understanding, Tongyi Wanxiang for image generation, and Qwen-Audio for audio processing.

Coding assistant

To support programming tasks, the Tongyi Lingma coding assistant, powered by the Qwen2.5-coder model, offers features like code completion, debugging, and batch test generation, enhancing developer efficiency.

Alibaba Cloud has also unveiled tools like Workflow for managing complex tasks, Agent for multi-agent collaboration, and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to improve model reliability. Additional tools for model evaluation and application monitoring will be available later this month.

The company’s 9th Generation Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances will launch globally in April. They boast a 20% efficiency boost and enhanced high-performance computing capabilities. Starting January 2025, the Alibaba Cloud Container Compute Service (ACS) will provide cost-effective container-based workload deployment.

To support developers further, the Alibaba Cloud GenAI Empowerment Program offers free credits, training, and co-marketing opportunities to foster innovation in generative AI applications.