Tech giant Alibaba recently unveiled its home-grown chatbot Tongyi Qianwen on April 7th, which is designed to challenge ChatGPT. The invitation-only service is now accessible to select corporate clients and certain media outlets. As part of its AI chatbot series, Tongyi Qianwen provides conversation services to create articles and poems, as well as make recipes, suggest compliments and give user prompts.
This chatbot has been released on the heels of Baidu’s ERNIE Bot and has been compared to both it and ChatGPT by a variety of Chinese media outlets. It isn’t just Xiaomi who’s entering the AI chatbot race however – many big Chinese tech companies like SenseTime, Huawei, and JD are set to bring forth their own alternatives in the near future.
Alibaba is a multinational conglomerate founded in 1999 by Jack Ma. Ma originally started the company as a business-to-business platform, but it has since grown to include a variety of other services such as digital payments and cloud computing. With its headquarters located in Hangzhou, China, Alibaba Group is now one of the largest tech companies in the world and its contributions to the world of AI are indisputable.
Jack Ma is the charismatic and ambitious founder of Alibaba. Ma presented the first Techange Conference in December 2014, an annual event that brings together tech entrepreneurs and investors from around the globe. Ma has been an advocate for the development of emerging technologies and has been imitating innovation ever since the launch of Alibaba almost two decades ago. His efforts have helped propel Alibaba to the forefront of the tech industry and have made its chatbot Tongyi Qianwen a highly-anticipated product.
