Alibaba opens up access to AI models for academic, commercial use

One of the models, Qwen-7B-Chat, is specialized for conversational AI scenarios, such as chatbots that have multiturn dialogues.

Anyone can access these models for free, whether for academic, research, or commercial purposes. However, companies with more than 100 million monthly active users need to get a license from Alibaba Cloud for commercial use.

Alibaba said that the Qwen-7B model has shown outstanding performance on several natural language processing tasks. It has surpassed other pre-trained open-source models of similar or larger sizes, the company said.

AI is a bright spot for Alibaba, especially with the attention that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has pulled toward generative AI.

The company’s cloud intelligence unit, which houses Alibaba Cloud, was the firm’s second-best performing unit in revenue terms in its most recent quarter. However, it only saw a 4% year-on-year increase.

See also: Alibaba’s financial health in 5 charts

In June, Alibaba’s outgoing chair and CEO Daniel Zhang announced his plans to step down from the roles to shift his focus to his duties at Alibaba Cloud.