Called Tongyi Qianwen, the AI large language model drafted invitation letters, planned trip itineraries and advised shoppers on types of makeup to purchase in a filmed demonstration.

Tongyi Qianwen will initially be integrated into DingTalk, Alibaba's workplace messaging app and can be used to summarize meeting notes, write emails and draft business proposals.

It will also be added to Tmall Genie, Alibaba's voice assistant.

Tongyi Qianwen is based on Tongyi, Alibaba’s proprietary pre-trained model framework that unifies various AI models.

The technology "will bring about big changes to the way we produce, the way we work, and the way we live our lives,” CEO Daniel Zhang told a livestreamed event.

AI models like Tongyi Qianwen are "the big picture for making AI more popular in the future," he added.

The Chinese internet giant's cloud unit plans to open up Tongyi Qianwen to clients so they can build their own customized large language models and began registrations for Tongyi Qianwen on Friday.

Global interest in generative AI, which learns how to take actions from past data to create new content, has surged since the release of ChatGPT by Microsoft-backed OpenAI in late 2022.

A number of Chinese companies have revealed or teased AI models and chatbots.

Search giant Baidu Inc., announced its Ernie Bot chatbot earlier this year. The bot remains open only to trial users at the moment.

Zhang said that Alibaba and other companies working on AI models were at the "starting line" of a new phenomenon.

"Seizing this opportunity is a common wish for all of us," he said.

 

New products

Meanwhile, China's SenseTime unveiled on Monday a slew of new AI-powered products including a chatbot and image generator, joining a global race ignited by the popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Xu Li, CEO and cofounder of one of China's largest AI firms, showed a live demonstration of the chatbot they called SenseChat writing an email and telling a story about a cat catching a fish when prompted by questions, as well as scripting computer codes.

The products were based off the latest version of the company's SenseNova big model, which it has been developing over the past five years, SenseTime's other cofounder Wang Xiaogang said.

Big models are typically trained on massive datasets using powerful hardware.

Global interest in AI technology has soared since the debut in late 2022 of ChatGPT, a popular chat bot developed by United States company OpenAI which uses generative AI technology that learns from past data to create new text, images or computer code.

Some governments are weighing the merits of AI, including risks such as privacy and copyright infringement.

"We have been focusing on developing our big models. In addition to our powerful AI infrastructure ... SenseTime has also developed the ability to deploy big models across our product line," said Wang, adding that SenseChat contained more than 100 billion parameters.

The company, which has been sanctioned by the US, did not provide detailed plans for a product roll out, but said attendees could try out the products.

In addition to SenseChat, the company also showcased an image generator, a digital avatar creation platform and a pair of complementary 3D modeling tools at the event.

These applications are meant to work in tandem to help SenseTime's clients to quickly create video in which the presenter, the environment and the products are all generated by AI in real time.

"We can generate a digital scene for a livestreaming room. The product creation and interactive content are all generated by AI, and the livestreaming room runs non-stop 24 hours a day," Xu said.

"In fact, you may not even be able to tell whether it is a real person doing the broadcasting at night."

In 2019, the US put SenseTime on a trade blacklist after accusing it of developing facial recognition programs that facilitate Beijing's surveillance of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang region.

SenseTime said at the time that it strongly opposed the US ban and would work with relevant authorities to resolve the situation.