However, concerns about China's national security laws, which require Alibaba to share information with Beijing when asked, have led to modest adoption outside of China and Asia. While Alibaba Cloud has so far avoided bans, Chinese telcos China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom, which also offer cloud services, have had their activities in the US restricted on national security grounds. This has raised concerns among developers considering using Modelscope's English language version.
Key takeaways:
- Alibaba Cloud has launched an English version of Modelscope, its models-as-service offering, which is comparable to services like Amazon Web Services' Bedrock or Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Studio.
- Since its launch in 2022, Modelscope has attracted over five million developers and hosts over 5,000 models, including over 1,500 high-quality Chinese-language datasets.
- Despite its success in Asia, Alibaba Cloud is not a major player in other markets due to concerns about China's national security laws, which require it to share information with Beijing when asked.
- Alibaba Cloud's launch of Modelscope in English is significant, especially in South East Asia where English is a more common second language and lingua franca of commerce and tech than Mandarin.