Chinese tech giant Alibaba has unveiled its own ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence (AI) model named Tongyi Qianwen across its e-commerce business, in a bid to catch up with OpenAI’s chatbot that went viral.
Tongyi Qianwen, (通义千问 in Chinese), means “seeking truth by asking a thousand questions”. The chatbot has been described as a “productivity assistant and idea generator” designed to understand and respond to human commands in English and Chinese.
It is currently now available for corporate customers in China. As an API, it is also available for beta testing for developers in China. Alibaba plans to integrate it into all business applications from enterprise communication, intelligent voice assistance, and e-commerce, to search and navigation.
DingTalk, Alibaba’s workplace messaging app, will be the first to incorporate the technology, which can be used to summarize meeting notes, write emails, and create business proposals. Alibaba’s virtual assistant, Tmall Genie, will soon be updated with Tongyi Qianwen for more dynamic conversations, allowing users to tell children’s stories, get diet recipes, and travel tips.
Group CEO Daniel Zhang, who also oversees Alibaba’s cloud division, announced the new AI-powered service at a cloud event in Beijing on April 11. “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 Zhang said.
“As a leading global cloud computing service provider, Alibaba Cloud is committed to making computing and AI services more accessible and inclusive for enterprises and developers, enabling them to uncover more insights, explore new business models for growth, and create more cutting-edge products and services for society.”
Tongyi Qianwen is not the only AI chatbot in China. Alibaba’s announcement follows similar initiatives by Chinese AI company developer SenseTime, which unveiled its own chatbot, called SenseChat, and an AI-powered chatbot called Ernie launched by Chinese search-engine giant Baidu. “In China, AI bots will initially develop fast in B2B [business-to-business] territory before business-to-customer [B2C] companies start using them,” says Xu Li, the co-founder, and CEO of SenseTime.
Following the development, China is racing to regulate the rapidly-advancing field of AI. In draft guidelines, the Cyberspace Administration of China has mandated security reviews for all generative AI-related services before they can be released to the public.
AI chatbot race
Generative AI, is a type of artificial intelligence that is capable of generating new and original content after being trained on a massive dataset. It gained popularity in recent months following the launch to the public of OpenAI’s ChatGPT which can hold conversations and generate anything from coding to poetry in response to user prompts.
Since then, companies globally have rushed to launch similar products. After Microsoft powered its Bing search engine with OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, Google launched its own AI chatbot Bard, heating up the race for AI dominance.
