Alibaba Group Holding is the latest Chinese Big Tech giant to reveal its anticipated response to ChatGPT, as the race to create a home-grown counterpart to Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s successful chatbot continues to garner resources and broad attention in China. 

On Friday, Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of their new service, Tongyi Qianwen, through its official WeChat account, and has opened the chatbot to invite-only beta testing for business clients.

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The home page for Tongyi Qianwen’s website is brief, with little information regarding the service’s functions, which are defined as a “productivity assistant and idea generator” “dedicated to responding to human commands” using a large language model (LLM).

The terms of service for the chatbot revealed that its is created by Damo Academy, Alibaba’s in-house scientific research organisation. In February, the Hangzhou-based e-commerce giant disclosed that its research institute was developing an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

Damo Academy originally announced its AliceMind LLM during the World AI Conference in September, when deputy head Zhou Jingren revealed it. He defined it as a multimodal pre-trained language model capable of processing a variety of inputs such as text, graphics, audio, and video.

According to a deck showcasing AliceMind, the language model might be utilised in a large number of domains like e-commerce, managing smart cities, healthcare, agriculture, smartphone photography, autonomous driving, and various other aspects of the Internet of Things.

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Damo previously said that their LLM has been tested by customers and in hundreds of internal application situations, including integration into Taobao.

LLMs or large language models, are taught using machine learning and are the foundation for AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT, allowing them to answer complex inquiries and create elaborate texts, code, or other material. 

While China has been a world leader in several areas of AI, the United States developed more than half of the world’s major language and multimodal models last year, as per Stanford University’s newest Artificial Intelligence Index Report.

So far, few users on social media have had the opportunity to test Tongyi Qianwen, but some have already found similarities to Baidu’s Ernie Bot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. On Friday, an account called Zhiwei took a trial of the service, claiming that all three are by and large the same, with some minor variances. 

According to Zhiwei, ChatGPT struggles with sophisticated Chinese, whereas Baidu’s Ernie Bot provides more confused responses to queries designed to test “common sense,” despite being more proficient at creative writing assignments.

Also read: How China is developing its own parallel generative AI universe by copying Stable Diffusion and DALL-E2

Alibaba’s ChatGPT-like service comes only weeks after their competitor Baidu launched the Ernie Bot in a highly publicised manner. The internet search giant’s mid-March launch event did not include a live preview though, which gave the beta product a bumpy start, but it eventually garnered more good reviews from early customers.

Tongyi Qianwen is also being presented only days before Alibaba’s annual cloud summit, which begins on Tuesday in Beijing.

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