Alibaba Cloud has open-sourced more than 100 of its recently released AI models, known as Qwen 2.5. The announcement was made at the company’s annual Apsara Conference.
Alibaba Group’s cloud computing arm also unveiled an upgraded full-stack infrastructure designed to meet growing demand for robust AI computing. This new infrastructure comprises innovative cloud products and services that enhance computing architecture, networks and data centers, all designed to support the development and broad applications of AI models.
Eddie Wu, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said: “Alibaba Cloud is investing with unprecedented intensity in the research and development of AI technology and building its global infrastructure. We aim to establish an AI infrastructure of the future to serve our global customers and unlock their business potential.”
The recently released Qwen 2.5 models range from 0.5 to 72 billion parameters in size and boast improved knowledge and stronger math and coding capabilities. Supporting over 29 languages, these models address a wide range of AI applications, both at the edge and in the cloud, across sectors from automotive and gaming to scientific research.
Alibaba Cloud’s open-source AI models are gaining ground
Since its debut in April 2023, the Qwen model series has gained significant traction, surpassing 40 million downloads on platforms such as Hugging Face and ModelScope. These designs have also inspired the creation of over 50,000 derivative designs on Hugging Face alone.
Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, commented: “This initiative is intended to empower developers and corporations of all sizes, increasing their ability to use AI technologies and further driving the growth of the open-source community.”
In addition to the open-source models, Alibaba Cloud announced an update to its flagship model, Qwen-Max. The improved version is said to demonstrate similar performance to other state-of-the-art models in areas such as language understanding, reasoning, mathematics and coding.
The company has also expanded its multimodal capabilities with a new text-to-video model as part of the large family of Tongyi Wanxiang models. This model can generate high-quality videos in various visual styles, from realistic scenes to 3D animation, based on text instructions in Chinese and English.
In addition, Alibaba Cloud introduced Qwen2-VL, an updated vision language model capable of understanding videos longer than 20 minutes and accepting video-based question answers. The company also launched AI Developer, an AI assistant powered by Qwen, designed to support programmers in automating tasks such as requirements analysis, code programming, and identifying and fixing bugs.
To support these AI advances, Alibaba Cloud has announced several infrastructure updates, including:
- CUBE DC 5.0, a state-of-the-art data center architecture that increases energy and operational efficiency.
- Alibaba Cloud Open Lake, a solution to maximize the utility of data for generative AI applications.
- PAI AI Scheduler, a proprietary cloud-native programming engine for improved management of computing resources.
- DMS: OneMeta+OneOps, a platform for unified metadata management across multiple cloud environments.
- 9th Generation Enterprise Elastic Compute Service (ECS), providing improved performance for various applications.
These updates from Alibaba Cloud – including the release of over 100 open-source models – aim to provide comprehensive support for customers and partners to maximize the benefits of the latest technology in building more efficient, sustainable and inclusive AI applications.
(Image source: www.alibabagroup.com)
See also: Tech giants urge EU to simplify AI regulations
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