Alibaba Group Holding is leading Chinese tech firms in the race for AI advancement, integrating its own ChatGPT-style service to DingTalk, its enterprise collaboration app, in order to make workplace communications more efficient. This integration utilizes the company’s own large language model (LLM), Tongyi Qianwen, to compose articles and generate posts based on simple user prompts, plus generate conversation-based stickers.
The application performance was showcased at a demonstration in Beijing on Tuesday, revealing the extension of the capabilities of Alibaba’s AI-driven solutions in comparison to OpenAI’s ChatGPT service which was released in November of 2020. OpenAI shared the lead in the Generative AI field which refers to the use of software to create new text, images or video based on user prompts.
Alibaba is looking to add Tongyi Qianwen to its Tmall Genie, a smart home appliance powered by the Internet of Things. Though they are lagging behind OpenAI in the development of Langauge models, with the power of their cloud computing and arsenal of application scenarios such as being used by over two-thousand hospitals, they are confident in the capability of their platform to gain traction.
Ye Jun, the president of DingTalk, mentioend the importance of the platform evolving with training and development, with the example of a prompt of “futangdaohuo” leading to an initially generated sticker of a head contained in boiling soup.
Joining the AI advancement race is ByteDance, owner of TikTok, as they showcase their cloud-based machine-learning driven platform that assists in the training of LLMs with low latency capabilities. Similarly, Baidu, the Chinese Big Tech that first unveiled their Ernie Bot ChatGPT rival last month, released a statement about the integration of their technology into their InfoFlow platform accessible by their employees. Tencent Holding’s Cloud Unit’s next-generation of high-performance clusters was developed to give support to the training of LLMs and self-driving technologies with high bandwidths and low latency.
A key figure in this article is DingTalk president, Ye Jun. Ye is a prominent figure in the Chinese tech industry, with a longstanding career as his leadership and technical skills have sought him out in many key start-up roles as well as into venture capital and investment. He currently leads the front in Alibaba’s largest enterprise collaboration platform that connect work scenario’s and Alibaba Cloud.
Alibaba Group Holding is a multinational conglomerate founded in 1999. It has risen to be the one of the largest tech companies in the world, primarily known for its e-commerce platform, Taobao, the world’s largest online bazaar. It is renowned for its global enterprise initiatives that look to innovate the working process in all industries with its cloud computing, data intelligence and logistics technologies. It has a reported annual revenue of $66.474 billion in 2020.
