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Alibaba (BABA) Boosts Generative AI Efforts With Tongyi Qianwen

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Alibaba (BABA - Free Report) plans to make its artificial intelligence (AI) model, Tongyi Qianwen, available to the public after receiving Chinese regulatory approval for the same.

Notably, Tongyi Qianwen is a large language model (LLM), which is similar to Microsoft (MSFT - Free Report) backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The Chinese e-commerce giant has integrated Tongyi Qianwen into all of its business applications, including the workplace communication app, DingTalk, and smart speaker, Tmall Genie.

Moreover, an open-source version of the large language model might be made available for free commercial use by society.

Reportedly, Alibaba has already started getting deals from companies like OPPO, Taobao, DingTalk and Zhejiang University, which are looking for training and developing their own LLMs based on Tongyi Qianwen.

Generative AI Holds Promise

We note that the latest move is in sync with BABA’s efforts toward boosting its generative AI efforts.

Apart from the plans for Tongyi Qianwen, the company recently launched its latest AI image generation model, Tongyi Wanxiang, offering detailed images in various styles, including watercolors, oil paintings, animation, sketch, flat illustration, and 3D cartoons, and transforming images into new ones using style transfer.

We believe these efforts are likely to strengthen Alibaba’s presence in the booming generative AI space.

Per a Fortune Business Insights report, the global generative AI market size is expected to hit $43.87 billion in 2023 and reach $667.96 billion by 2030, witnessing a CAGR of 47.5% between 2023 and 2030.

A Grand View Research report predicts the global generative AI market to witness a CAGR of 35.6% during the forecast period of 2023-2030. Growing prospects of Alibaba in this promising market are expected to aid it in winning investors’ confidence in the near term.

Alibaba has lost 0.1% in the year-to-date period, underperforming the industry’s growth of 46.4%.

Notably, macroeconomic uncertainties have been a major concern for the company for the past few quarters.

Intensifying Competition

We note that the latest move will allow this Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) company to compete well with some notable industry players like Microsoft, Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) and Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) , which are also making concerted efforts to bolster their generative AI efforts.

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Microsoft, which has taken the world by storm on the back of ChatGPT, is gaining on the integration of OpenAI’s next-generation LLM — GPT-4 — into its search engine Bing and browser Edge.

Further, Microsoft Azure offers Azure OpenAI Service, which enables the seamless application of Large Language Models (LLM) and generative AI techniques in various use cases.

Meanwhile, Amazon is riding on its AI-powered solution, Amazon Bedrock, which is designed to accelerate the deployment of generative AI-backed foundation models (FM). Also, Bedrock provides access to FMs of Amazon Titan, a ChatGPT rival.

Further, the recent introduction of the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center program, which helps connect customers across the world with AWS’ AI and machine learning (ML) experts to aid them in building and deploying generative AI solutions seamlessly, remains noteworthy. Amazon also introduced generative AI for small businesses, helping sellers to write product descriptions, titles and listing details, thereby enhancing the speed and ease of product listing.

Alphabet’s Google is also enjoying the growing momentum of its chatbot, Bard.

The search giant recently rolled out consulting services to bolster generative AI efforts. The new offerings include advice and tools, through which Google Cloud strives to aid clients in adopting generative AI techniques.

GOOGL is also set to release its conversational AI software, Gemini, comprising extensive language models that offer chatbot optimization, text summarization, content generation, email drafts, music lyrics and news articles, enabling users to create personalized content.

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