Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing subsidiary of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, announced its new ChatGPT-style product Tongyi Qianwen during the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit on Tuesday. The artificial intelligence (AI) powered service will initially be deployed on DingTalk, Alibaba's workplace communication software, and Tmall Genie, a provider of smart home appliances. With this move, Alibaba follows Baidu's footsteps after it revealed its own ChatTPT version called Ernie Bot in March.
As the world's third leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018 and Asia Pacific's top player in the same category, Alibaba plans to integrate Tongyi Qianwen into all of its products to enhance their intelligence capabilities.
"By incorporating our state-of-the-art AI technology into our products through Tongyi Qianwen, we are taking the intelligence capabilities of Alibaba’s offerings to a whole new level," said Daniel Zhang Yong, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group.
The introduction of Tongyi Qianwen marks an important milestone for both AI development within China and as part of global competition among major players like OpenAI with their GPT series. As companies race to improve their AI-powered services such as natural language processing (NLP), customer support and data analysis tools become increasingly sophisticated.
Liu Xuefeng, Vice President at Tmall Genie stated: "We believe that integrating Tongyi Qianwen into our smart home appliance ecosystem will significantly improve user experience by providing seamless voice interactions while enhancing overall functionality."
Experts predict that widespread adoption of cutting-edge technologies like these will transform industries across various sectors including e-commerce platforms and other business-to-consumer services.
In addition to improving consumer experiences within existing products offered by companies like Baidu and now Alibaba, this wave of AI innovation could potentially lead to the development of new applications and services that have yet to be discovered.