Alibaba is also investing in AI startups and has released a multilingual LLM for several Southeast Asian languages, potentially leveraging its established footprint in the region through its cloud computing business and acquisition of ecommerce platform Lazada. No clear leader has emerged in China's LLM space, with venture capital firms and corporate investors spreading their bets across multiple contenders.
Key takeaways:
- Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba, are striving to match the capabilities of OpenAI's ChatGPT, with researchers sharing similar experiences and work schedules on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.
- Binyuan Hui, a natural language processing researcher at Alibaba’s large language model team Qwen, shared his daily schedule, which includes coding, model training, brainstorming, and reading research papers.
- Alibaba's Qwen has open sourced a series of foundation models trained with both English and Chinese data, and has integrated them into its enterprise communication platform Dingtalk and online retailer Tmall.
- Alibaba has also released a large language model for several Southeast Asian languages, called SeaLLM, as part of its efforts to carve out a niche in the competitive AI space.