Alibaba, the Chinese multinational conglomerate, has announced that its large language model called Tongyi Qianwen will be available for public and enterprise access throughout China starting on September 13th. Tongyi Qianwen is an artificial intelligence system similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that has been trained on a corpus of both English and Chinese text. While the exact specifications of Tongyi Qianwen are not known, rumors suggest that it may have been trained with as many as 10 trillion parameters, which is 10 times the number of parameters used in OpenAI’s GPT4 model. However, these rumors have yet to be substantiated.
This announcement comes after Alibaba previously released two 7 billion-parameter open-source models based on the Tongyi Qianwen architecture. These models, known as Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat, can comprehend images, texts, and bounding boxes in prompts and facilitate multi-round question answering in both English and Chinese. The release of these models demonstrate Alibaba’s commitment to advancing AI technologies in China and making them accessible to a wider range of users.
Prior to this public rollout, Tongyi Qianwen was only available to a limited group of users during its beta test phase. The decision to make it more widely accessible coincides with the Chinese government’s recent loosening of restrictions related to the use of AI technologies. In June, the Chinese government published a set of guidelines stating that all AI technologies released to the public would require a special vetting and certification process. These rules went into effect on August 15th and resulted in several Chinese companies, including Baidu, Tencent, TikTok, and ByteDance, receiving approval to launch their AI models.
The updated restrictions also include provisions such as barring the generation of images in the likeness of China’s president, Xi Jinping, and mandating organizations to address objectionable content within a three-month period. Earlier versions of the legislation proposed monetary fines, but those plans were ultimately scrapped. These regulations reflect the Chinese government’s efforts to ensure responsible and ethical use of AI technologies while still encouraging innovation and development in the industry.
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In contrast to China’s approach, the United States is taking only preliminary steps to regulate AI technologies. On September 13th, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hosted a forum with top U.S. tech CEOs and founders to discuss potential policy ideas regarding AI regulations. This forum was the first of nine scheduled meetings, highlighting the importance and urgency of developing comprehensive AI regulations in the U.S.
As AI technologies become more advanced and widely used, it is crucial for governments around the world to establish clear guidelines and regulations. By doing so, they can strike a balance between fostering innovation and ensuring the responsible use of AI. Both China and the U.S. are recognizing the need for regulations, although they are currently taking different approaches.
With the public availability of Tongyi Qianwen, Alibaba is driving forward the adoption and accessibility of AI technologies in China. This move enables individuals and businesses across the country to leverage the power of AI for various applications and use cases. As Tongyi Qianwen becomes more widely used, it has the potential to revolutionize industries such as customer service, content generation, and language translation.
Alibaba’s commitment to AI innovation is evident through its continuous development and release of large language models like Tongyi Qianwen. By leveraging the potential of AI, Alibaba aims to enhance productivity, efficiency, and accuracy in various sectors. As AI technologies continue to advance, it will be interesting to observe how they shape the future of industries and transform the way we live and work.
