Alibaba launches Tongyi Qianwen chatbot

Alibaba rolled out Tongyi Qianwen, a ChatGPT-style chatbot built by its DAMO Academy research arm, without advance announcement. Access was initially restricted to corporate clients and a limited number of media outlets on an invite-only basis rather than opened to the public.

The company described the model as an “efficiency assistant and idea-generator,” able to generate articles, poems, outlines and recipes in a range of styles. Alibaba did not disclose how many parameters the model was trained on. Some early coverage conflated it with the company’s unrelated 2021 M6 model, which Alibaba had claimed was the first Chinese AI model to exceed ten trillion parameters; Tongyi Qianwen was a separate, later system. In early hands-on testing it was reported to outperform ChatGPT on complex Chinese-language questions but lag on programming tasks, and unlike Baidu’s competing Ernie Bot, it did not support multimodal generation at launch.

The release placed Alibaba alongside Baidu among the first major Chinese technology companies to field a ChatGPT-style product following the chatbot’s global reception the previous winter. The Tongyi Qianwen name predates the open-weight Qwen model family Alibaba began releasing from August 2023, which became the company’s more consequential contribution to the open-model ecosystem.