Tech giants increase push to enhance AI solutions
More than a dozen industry partners, collaborators and software developers gather at the DingTalk Ecosystem Conference held on Tuesday in Shanghai.
Chinese tech giants are stepping up their efforts to enhance artificial intelligence solutions for business customers, especially for small and micro enterprises.
Alibaba's work communication and collaboration platform DingTalk is building infrastructure for large language models (LLMs) to be easily accessed by application developers and small and micro enterprise customers.
DingTalk President Ye Jun said the company would release a new version next month to include artificial intelligence capabilities for independent software developers where large language models could be easily accessed. Ye was speaking at at the DingTalk Ecosystem Conference held on Tuesday in Shanghai.
Currently over 10 million applications by third-party developers are available on DingTalk, with over eight million being light applications.
DingTalk is committed to serving small and micro businesses and helping revitalize economic development with the increasing adoption of digital operation models and light-weight software, representatives said.
Ecosystem partners, including software and hardware providers and independent software vendors, have already surpassed 5,000 after DingTalk started to commercialize its product suite last year while it keeps the basic model free and upgrades models for enterprises wanting customized features.
Alibaba Cloud is among the first batch of local companies to offer a smart robotic assistant with Tongyi Qianwen, a ChatGPT-like service unveiled in April that helps analyze audio and video files and generates text summaries.
The company hopes its full-stack product and technology would give it an advantage over other players, which mainly focus on one of the layers.
Internet giants hope to allow software developers to easily access artificial intelligence capabilities.
Robotic assistants for office administration of various industries were also showcased at the DingTalk Ecosystem Conference.
For the second quarter ending June 30, Alibaba's Cloud Intelligence Group, including Alibaba Cloud, DingTalk, and other businesses, posted an annual revenues increase of 4 percent to 25.12 billion yuan.
Group Chairman and Chief Executive Daniel Zhang is transitioning his executive role to lead the Cloud Intelligence Group as chairman and chief executive, taking effect from September 10.
Separately, Tencent announced last week it was also testing its own large language model among employees, and plans to unveil a proprietary artificial-intelligence model later this year.
Tencent said during its quarterly earnings conference call that it was on track to develop a large language model to power generative AI and other applications.
Tencent chairman and chief executive Ma Huateng said it would continue to drive innovation through generative AI, and provide a library of models to partners via the Tencent Cloud Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) offering, as well as refining its own foundation model.
