China’s technology giant, Alibaba, has unveiled a new ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence product to be integrated across all of the company’s apps in the near future.
Earlier this year, Alibaba announced it was working on a rival to the wildly popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
The company’s cloud computing unit, Alibaba Cloud, announced on Tuesday it will be rolling out a generative artificial intelligence model named Tongyi Qianwen (TQ) – which translates to “truth from a thousand questions”.
An initial product demonstration showed the AI model planning trip itineraries, drafting invitation letters and guiding shoppers on make-up purchases.
The company said the TQ rollout will begin with a deployment on DingTalk, Alibaba’s workplace communication and collaboration software, and Tmall Genie, the company’s Alexa-esque voice assistant.
Toting both Chinese and English language capabilities, the product is reportedly capable of summarizing meeting notes, writing emails and drafting business proposals.
Through its deployment on the Tmall Genie voice assistant, Alibaba said the product can engage in “more dynamic and vivid conversations” with China-based users – namely, TQ can offer travel advice, provide healthy diet recipes and “develop and tell stories to children”.
In a livestream event, Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang said the new technology will “bring about big changes to the way we produce, the way we work, and the way we live our lives”.
“We are at a technological watershed moment driven by generative AI and cloud computing, and businesses across all sectors have started to embrace intelligence transformation to stay ahead of the game”, said Zhang.
“As a leading global cloud computing service provider, Alibaba Cloud is committed to making computing and AI services more accessible and inclusive for enterprises and developers”, he added.
While the company did not provide a precise timeframe for the TQ rollout, it said the AI model will be integrated into “all business applications across Alibaba’s ecosystem in the near future”.
China drafts new AI rules
Alibaba’s AI product announcement comes alongside newly drafted AI rules from China’s cyber space regulator.
On Tuesday, the Cyberspace Administration of China unveiled measures for managing generative AI which will require makers of new AI products to submit to security assessments before releasing to the public.
The draft law states that content generated by coming AI products must reflect the country’s “core socialist values” and not encourage subversion of state power.
It also laid out rules to prohibit AI content from promoting discrimination based on race, ethnicity and gender, and further stated AI content should not provide false information.
In recent months, tech giants across the globe have been developing and releasing generative AI products in a breakneck race for market dominance.
Initiatives from Meta, Microsoft and Google have been announced to mixed receptions, and ChatGPT has continued with rapid iterations of its revolutionary AI language model.
Earlier this month, a controversial callout was made for big tech companies to abide by a six-month freeze on “out-of-control” AI development.
The widespread advancement of AI has spurred growing concerns over the technology’s potential ethical and economic impact – and in late March, over 1,300 academics, tech and business experts signed an Elon Musk-backed open letter urging AI companies to slow development.
Meanwhile, Italy has become the first Western country to issue a ban against ChatGPT, as the country’s privacy watchdog voiced concerns over the AI chatbot’s data privacy practices; and an Australian mayor could become the first person to sue over ChatGPT inaccuracies.
Alibaba’s cloud units intends to open the TQ AI product to clients so they can build their own custom language models, and the company has already declared plans to add more capabilities such as image-processing and text-to-image generation.
TQ is now available for general enterprise customers in China for beta testing.
