Alibaba’s large language model tops global ranking of AI developer platform Hugging Face

Three of the four top 10-ranked Chinese LLMs were from Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen family of AI models

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The lofty recognition given to Alibaba Group Holding’s family of large language models shows the company’s rapid progress in artificial intelligence. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:00am, 28 Jun 2024

Alibaba Group Holding’s family of large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning generative artificial intelligence (AI) services like ChatGPT – has been ranked among the world’s top 10 open-source models.

Three of the four top 10-ranked Chinese LLMs were from the Tongyi Qianwen series, also known as Qwen, developed by e-commerce and cloud computing giant Alibaba, according to AI and machine-learning developer platform Hugging Face, which released its updated leaderboard with new metrics on Wednesday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Hangzhou-based Alibaba’s Qwen-72B-Instruct LLM topped the list with an average score of 43.02 across six benchmarks. This Qwen model was trained on 72 billion “parameters” – a machine-learning term for variables present in an AI system during training, which helps establish how data prompts yield the desired output.

“Qwen 72B [Instruct] is the king and Chinese open models are dominating overall,” Hugging Face co-founder and chief executive Clement Delangue said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday.

The Tongyi Qianwen large language models, developed and operated by Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit, are used in industries ranging from consumer electronics to cars and online games. Photo: Shutterstock

That particular Qwen model was credited for “its performance in maths, long-range reasoning and knowledge”, according to Wednesday’s post on Hugging Face developer community’s website.

Meanwhile, Alibaba’s Qwen-72B and Qwen1.5-110B models made it to the third and tenth spots, respectively, as of Thursday. The rankings are expected to change over time, as more LLMs get evaluated, according to Hugging Face.