Alibaba unveils Tongyi Qianwen, a rival to ChatGPT

Chinese tech giant Alibaba announced the launch of an AI chatbot, Tongyi Qianwen. The news is reported by BBC.

The tool supports English and Chinese. It will initially appear in the corporate messenger DingTalk.

The chatbot will perform a range of tasks, including:

• transcribing conversations from meetings into written notes;
• drafting emails;
• preparing business proposals.

The company will also add Tongyi Qianwen to the smart speaker Tmall Genie.

The cloud computing unit said it would integrate the tool across Alibaba’s businesses “in the near future.” However, officials did not specify timelines.

Tongyi Qianwen literally translates as “searching for an answer by asking a thousand questions”.

“We are at a technological watershed driven by generative artificial intelligence and cloud computing,” said Daniel Zhang, chairman and chief executive of Alibaba.

Interest in generative AI and chatbots has surged amid the popularity of ChatGPT. Since the launch of the tool in November 2022, a number of tech firms have announced their own alternatives.

In January 2023, Microsoft and OpenAI struck a multi-billion-dollar deal. This enabled the startup’s language models to be added to the Bing search engine.

In February, Google unveiled its version of conversational AI — the chatbot Bard. A month later, a limited number of users gained access to the tool.

In March, Chinese tech giant Baidu introduced Earnie Bot.

Earlier in March, more than a thousand industry experts, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, urged a six-month pause on the training of language models more powerful than GPT-4 from OpenAI.

Subsequently, a number of other experts criticised the authors of the letter. They were accused of distorting scientific research to promote the idea of the ‘excessive power’ of AI.

In April, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also expressed doubts about the advisability of the initiative. He said pausing AI research would benefit only China.