Alibaba's ChatGPT "Tongyi Qianwen" is officially announced! Tmall Genie and DingTalk's new features are revealed

At the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit, Zhou Jingren, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, officially released the "Tongyi Qianwen" model. In this article, the author introduces the highlights of Alibaba's self-developed ChatGPT-like product "Tongyi Qianwen" model and important information from the meeting. Let's take a look.

On April 7, Alibaba Cloud announced without warning that its self-developed ChatGPT product was open for enterprise invitation testing. The model is called "Tongyi Qianwen". As soon as the invitation was released, it attracted strong attention from the industry.

At the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit held yesterday, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Chief Technology Officer Zhou Jingren officially released the "Tongyi Thousand Questions" model and gave a brief introduction to its functions.

At the meeting, CEO Zhang Yong said that all Alibaba products will be connected to the "Tongyi Qianwen" big model in the future for a comprehensive transformation. Facing the AI ​​era, all products are worth redoing with the big model.

In Alibaba's vision, "Tongyi Qianwen" is not just an AI chat tool that competes with ChatGPT, but a complete large model system.

So what are the highlights of the "Tongyi Qianwen"? What other important information was revealed at the meeting? Let's take a look at it together.

1. What new features do DingTalk and Tmall Genie, which were the first to connect to “Tongyi Qianwen”, have?

At present, "Tongyi Qianwen" will bring copywriting, conversation chat, knowledge Q&A, logical reasoning, code writing, text summarization and image and video understanding services to customers, and realize the generalization of AI capabilities through API plug-ins.

Zhang Yong also said at the meeting that DingTalk and Tmall Genie will be the first to connect to "Tongyi Qianwen" for testing. At the same time, Tmall Genie and DingTalk both announced on their official public accounts and conducted demos.

After being connected to Tongyi Qianwen, Tmall Genie will become more human and smarter , with significantly improved knowledge, emotions, personality, and memory. It supports free conversations, can interrupt and switch topics at any time, and can generate content at any time according to user needs and scenarios.

For example, users can ask Tmall Genie to "compose a 1-hour playlist with 50% rock-style songs" while running, or chat with Tmall Genie about culture and life. The new Tmall Genie can not only answer children's tricky questions, but also create a new story of the "Big Bang" together. After DingTalk is connected to Tongyi Qianwen, nearly 10 AI functions can be realized, including creating poetry novels, writing emails, generating marketing plans, generating meeting records and automatically summarizing meeting minutes, generating to-do items, etc.

For example, when a user is added to a new group chat, DingTalk can automatically generate a chat summary based on the previous chat content in the group, helping users quickly understand the context without having to manually climb the stairs.

In DingTalk documents, users can input their requirements and let DingTalk create content.

In addition to generating copy content, it can also generate creative images according to user instructions.

Even more amazing is that users can also generate low-code business applications by taking photos and uploading a functional sketch to generate an application without writing code. The threshold for application development has been lowered again.

According to reports, in the next step, Tongyi Qianwen will be gradually embedded in Alibaba's e-commerce, search, navigation, entertainment and other scenarios. For example, in the online shopping scenario, if a user wants to hold a birthday party, Tongyi Qianwen can help generate birthday activity plans and shopping lists.

2. Tongyi Qianwen aims to be a general platform to help enterprises build their own GPT

Alibaba Cloud Intelligence CTO Zhou Jingren said that in the future all software will be worthy of being connected to the big model for upgrading and transformation. We will open up Tongyi Qianwen's capabilities to create its own exclusive GPT for each enterprise. We welcome everyone to use Alibaba Cloud to develop their own big models.

Alibaba Cloud will provide complete computing power and large-scale model infrastructure to enable all enterprises and institutions, including startups, to better realize innovation and comprehensively improve China's overall AI capabilities. In the future, every enterprise can not only call on the full capabilities of Tongyi Qianwen on Alibaba Cloud, but also train its own enterprise large-scale models based on its own industry knowledge and application scenarios.

For example, each enterprise can have its own intelligent customer service, intelligent shopping guide, intelligent voice assistant, copywriting assistant, AI designer, autonomous driving model, etc. On the day of the press conference, Alibaba also announced some of the cooperation that has been reached: the OPPO big model infrastructure jointly built with OPPO Andes Smart Cloud will complete the continuous learning, fine-tuning and front-end prompt engineering of the big model based on Tongyi Qianwen, and will build AI services to serve its massive terminal users in the future.

In addition, many companies including Geely, Zhiji, Chery, Momenta, Coca-Cola, Bosideng, and iReader Technology have expressed their intention to explore technical cooperation with Alibaba Cloud in large-model-related scenarios.

3. Major Internet companies have entered the market one after another. What is the level of “Tongyi Qianwen”?

Ever since ChatGPT became popular in February, whenever domestic giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and JD.com release related news, it will attract attention and heated discussions in the industry.

On March 16, Baidu took the lead in launching the GPT product "Wenxin Yiyan"; on March 30, Tencent said it was developing a chatbot similar to ChatGPT; on April 8, JD.com announced that it would release "ChatJD" this year, positioning it as the industrial version of ChatGPT; on April 9, 360 announced that the artificial intelligence product matrix "360 Zhinao" will be launched on April 16 for search scenarios; on April 11, Alibaba officially launched the "Tongyi Qianwen" model; ...

In addition, a number of Internet giants such as Huawei, iFlytek, and Megvii are accelerating their development layout. It is worth mentioning that in addition to the Internet giants, big names in the technology circle such as Kai-Fu Lee, Xiaochuan Wang, and Huiwen Wang have also returned and entered the market with huge funds. Whether it is Baidu's Wenxin Yiyan or Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen, they are still in the invitation beta stage. It will take some time for large-scale public beta testing, and it may take even longer before they can be truly commercialized.

So, in comparison, what is the level of the "Tongyi Qianwen" released this time? Combining many online articles on the actual evaluation of Tongyi Qianwen, the overall evaluation is: it exceeds expectations, but is far from enough. Compared with Wenxin Yiyan, Tongyi Qianwen only provides text generation functions, and does not emphasize multimodal functions such as voice and pictures, but it is more based on the scenarios needed by users, especially at the press conference, it demonstrated more capabilities that will be realized in practical applications.

For example, it can be used in practical application scenarios such as office, shopping, and travel. Although it cannot be directly said to be better than Wenxin Yiyan, it is at least not inferior to Wenxin Yiyan.

I thought Baidu would be far ahead of other domestic competitors, but at present, strong competitors like Alibaba should not be underestimated.

Overall, Wenxin Yiyan and Tongyi Qianwen are still significantly behind GPT-4, but they are still in the internal testing stage. Generative AI needs to undergo continuous deep learning and polishing, and many large companies have entered the market. No matter what, we are full of expectations for future life.

Author: Yan Tao