- Alibaba Cloud launched its new artificial intelligence model, "Qwen2.5-Omni-7B," on Thursday, expanding its "Qwen series" amid growing competition in China's large language model space. This multimodal model can process text, images, audio, and videos, providing real-time text and natural speech responses. It can be deployed on edge devices like mobile phones, offering high efficiency without compromising performance.
- Alibaba highlights its potential for developing cost-effective AI agents, particularly for intelligent voice applications, such as aiding visually impaired individuals with real-time audio descriptions. The model is open-sourced on platforms like Hugging Face and Github, following the trend set by DeepSeek's breakthrough R1 model. Alibaba Cloud has open-sourced over 200 generative AI models in recent years.
Why it matters
The company has committed to its AI strategy, announcing plans to invest $53 billion in cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the next three years, surpassing its total spending in the space over the past decade. Kai Wang, an equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC that major Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, which are building data centers to support AI and develop their own large language models (LLMs), are well-positioned to benefit from China’s AI boom following DeepSeek's breakthrough.
