Alibaba Showcases ChatGPT Competitor Tongyi Qianwen, Integrated in Enterprise Applications First

Screenshot of the Official Tongyi Qianwen Site (photo: Citra/voi)

JAKARTA - Alibaba Cloud has just showcased its ChatGPT competitor, Tongyi Qianwen, which will be pre-integrated for all enterprise applications in the near future.

Tongyi Qianwen means, looking for answers by asking a thousand questions, which is currently only available in two languages, Chinese and English.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Big Language Model (LLM) is reportedly built on a model consisting of ten trillion parameters, well over 175 billion GPT-3.

The tool is capable of drafting invitation letters, planning itineraries and advising buyers on the type of product to buy in a demo video.

"We are at a defining moment in technology driven by generative AI and cloud computing," said Alibaba chairman and chief executive Daniel Zhang at the launch of Tongyi Qianwen.

For starters, Tongyi Qianwen will be added to DingTalk, Alibaba's workplace messaging app. He will perform a number of tasks including turning conversation in meetings into written notes, writing emails and drafting business proposals.

Alibaba will also integrate it into Tmall Genie, which is similar to Amazon's Alexa voice assistant smart speaker.

The company promises Tmall Genie will evolve to handle tasks such as providing meaningful assistance to children with homework.

As well as being used for its enterprise applications, Alibaba will also focus on Tongyi Qianwen for businesses, where the tool is available to create an LLM tailored to an organization's specific needs.

They can build AI-infused apps without the hassle of building a model from scratch (and stimulate consumption of Alibaba Cloud).

The custom LLM service is already in beta for Chinese organizations. The beta version of the Tongyi Qianwen API is also operational for Middle Kingdom developers, as quoted from The Register, Tuesday, April 11.

Alibaba Cloud can also point to existing customers for Tongyi Qianwen, which will be integrated across Alibaba's products, from e-commerce to logistics, and even a digital media and entertainment group that produces movies, games and music.

For your information, the generative AI hype has soared since ChatGPT was released by Microsoft-backed OpenAI in November 2022. Then followed by Bing Chat and Google which has Bard.