Alibaba says its Tongyi Qianwen AI models are used by over 90,000 corporate clients in China

Alibaba launched Qwen a year ago, weeks after rival Baidu introduced its Ernie Bot, which is used by 85,000 corporate clients, according to company founder and CEO Robin Li Yanhong in early April this year.

Alibaba’s Zhou said the company’s efforts to enhance its LLMs’ capabilities have enabled clients to come up with innovative applications of AI.

Qwen also supports new features in Xiaomi’s latest smartphone models, including the ability to analyse images of food and generate corresponding recipes, Alibaba said.

Other major Qwen clients include Beijing-based video game developer Perfect World Games.

On Thursday, Alibaba also unveiled an updated version of its LLM, Tongyi Qianwen 2.5, which the company said performs better in various Chinese capabilities than GPT-4, which is OpenAI’s most advanced model open to the public.

The Hangzhou-based company also launched several open-source models of various sizes, including the Qwen1.5-110B, which was trained with 110 billion parameters, making it one of the largest Chinese open-source models.

A larger number of parameters generally translates into more complex AI models. Most mainstream Chinese open-source models have been trained with 7 billion to 14 billion parameters.