Alibaba began rolling out its own ChatGPT-type technology this week, bringing the Chinese tech giant up to par with other technology behemoths around the world. Tongyi Qianwen, the company’s large language model that’s trained around big amounts of data in order for it to identify and generate content, was originally revealed last month and will be integrated into a digital assistant called Tingwu.
Why it matters: Tongyi Tingwu, Alibaba’s new AI-powered assistant, has the ability to analyze audio and video files and generate a text summary. The tool is now available for public testing and will be utilized by Alibaba’s business messaging service DingTalk first, before spreading to other services.
- China’s tech firms, specifically Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, have not launched a wide-scale public rival to ChatGPT just yet as they’re opting to primarily focus their technology on specific use cases and not get into murky water with regulators.
- “We live at a time when a growing amount of video and audio content is being consumed in various formats every day. In line with this, Tongyi Tingwu aims to use the large language model to facilitate faster and better comprehension and easier sharing of multimedia content,” said Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence in a press release.
- Later this year, users can expect real-time Chinese-to-English translation of content to become available with Tongyi Tingwu.
