Alibaba said in a statement that its new Qwen2.5-Omni-7B system demonstrated particularly high performance in speech understanding and generation. — Reuters
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has released a new artificial intelligence model in its Qwen series that the company says can process text, pictures, audio and video, and is efficient enough to run directly on mobile phones and laptops.
The company said it expects that the new model, now publicly available on Hugging Face and GitHub, will be used to build so-called AI agents that can, for example, help a visually impaired person navigate their environment through real-time audio descriptions.
Alibaba has been releasing AI products at a frenetic pace since going all-in on the technology this year. The ecommerce and cloud computing leader in China came out with a different version of its Qwen model just days after DeepSeek made waves in January. And earlier this month, it unveiled a new version of its AI assistant Quark app.
Alibaba is certainly not the only AI developer to make a multimodal model. OpenAI and Alphabet Inc’s Google both offer generative AI tools that process different types of input including text and audio. On Tuesday, OpenAI expanded its capabilities by adding more advanced image generation features to ChatGPT.
Alibaba said in a statement that its new Qwen2.5-Omni-7B system demonstrated particularly high performance in speech understanding and generation.
The internet company co-founded by Jack Ma plans to spend more on its AI and cloud computing network than it has over the past decade. Alibaba envisions becoming a key partner to companies developing and applying AI to the real world as models evolve and need increasing amounts of computing power.
Since DeepSeek upstaged OpenAI with a powerful model that purportedly cost just several million dollars to build, China’s tech leaders have flooded the market with a rapid succession of low-cost AI services, undercutting premium offerings from the likes of OpenAI and Google.
While the jury is out on whether these AI releases match or surpass the most cutting-edge systems from Western AI developers, these newer options are putting more pressure on the business models of leading US companies. – Bloomberg
