Alibaba Prepares to Launch ChatGPT Competitor

Since the beginning of 2023, users have been able to watch a whole parade of presentations of generative AI chatbots developed by world-famous technology companies. Alibaba Group also did not stand aside, saying that its specialists are working on creating a competitor to ChatGPT – the generative chatbot Tongyi Qianwen. Translated from Chinese, its name roughly means "the truth obtained from the answers to thousands of questions." It does not have an English name.

On April 11, Alibaba officially presented the new product and emphasized that Tongyi Qianwen speaks not only Chinese, but also English. First, it will be implemented in the company's internal messenger – DingTalk. A little later, this language model will be integrated into the “smart” home voice assistant Tmall Genie, which controls music and home appliances. Representatives of the company shared that Tongyi Qianwen will mainly be used to perform routine, but at the same time important business tasks: transcribing conversations at meetings, drafting commercial proposals and writing correspondence.

A sharp jump in mass interest in artificial intelligence of a generative type occurred after the launch of the ChatGPT chatbot by OpenAI in November 2022. Given the current situation in the world, on April 11, the China Cyberspace Administration approved a package of measures to regulate generative AI. One of its rules states that companies will now have to be held accountable for the legality of using the data on which their language models are trained.