Alibaba Photo: VCG

Tech giant Alibaba started testing its ChatGPT-style large-scale model named Tongyi Qianwen on Friday, as Chinese tech enterprises try to catch up with the new industrial trend.

Alibaba Cloud announced on its WeChat account that it has started the enterprise invitation test. According to the test website, Tongyi Qianwen is a "large model that responds to human commands."

The model is expected to have its formal launch during an Alibaba Cloud event on April 11, where Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba Group as well as head of the company's cloud division, is scheduled to give a speech.

Since the formation of the company's DAMO research institute in 2017, it has made progress in cutting-edge scientific research fields such as natural language processing. It started research and development for Tongyi Qianwen in 2019. 

On March 28, Zhang said during a teleconference that the combination of cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) is in a critical period of development, with disruptive breakthroughs occurring in generative AI. "Alibaba will make every effort to build its own AI pre-training large model and provide arithmetic support for the models and applications that are emerging in the market," Zhang noted.

In addition to Alibaba, other Chinese tech companies have launched or will soon launch their own ChatGPT-style AI bots.

For instance, Baidu has joined the AI chatbot race, with its Ernie Bot application open to trial users. And Huawei Technologies will unveil its natural language processing AI model Pangu at an event on Saturday, according to media reports.

Global Times