What is Tongyi Qianwen?

The latest ChatGPT of China is Unveiled

Hey Everyone,

As I cover LLMs and breaking news in A.I, China’s own experiments in Generative A.I. bears some watching. While Baidu has announced Ernie, in April it’s the turn of Alibaba.

Alibaba has an ingenious way to gain back market cap across it’s sprawling BigTech and highly diversified business model. It recently announced it will split its company into six business groups, each with the ability to raise outside funding and go public. I actually think Western monopolies should be forced to do the same, with each segment being held accountable.

Alibaba said in a statement that the move is “designed to unlock shareholder value and foster market competitiveness.” Over night, Chinese regulators have released draft rules designed to manage how companies develop so-called generative artificial intelligence products like ChatGPT. This allows China’s versions of these Chatbots to flourish on their own terms.

Tongyi Qianwen is Alibaba’s answer to ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, Ernie and all the rest, it will possess Chinese and English language capabilities, the tech giant said at the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit.

China is not exactly a newcomer to Generative A.I., they have a lot of R&D in the area as well. In some sense they are a bit late as compared with OpenAI however, As Alibaba is mostly known as an e-commerce giant and they launched their chatbot a few weeks after Baidu’s received mixed reception, as China races to advance in generative AI, although with their own censorship apparatus slowing things down somewhat.