Alibaba Cloud to kick off annual Apsara tech event with focus on AI
Alibaba’s cloud unit will kick off its annual tech event this week, bringing together large language model start-ups to discuss the future of artificial general intelligence.
Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud unit is set to kick off its annual tech event this week, as China’s largest cloud service provider brings together large language model (LLM) start-ups to discuss the future of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Eddie Wu Yongming, chief executive of both Alibaba and its cloud unit, will deliver a keynote speech on Thursday morning to open the Apsara Conference 2024 to rally the country’s AI community, according to an agenda released by Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
The event, which runs from Thursday to Saturday in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province where Alibaba is headquartered, will feature three main forums – AI, Cloud Computing and Application Practice – as well as over 400 sessions that bring together leading tech executives and experts to discuss trends in cloud and AI.
Alibaba Cloud, which is doubling down on its self-developed Tongyi Qianwen family of LLMs, is likely to release new AI products at the event, including a video generation LLM, according to Chinese media reports on Wednesday. Regarded as one of China’s best hopes to catch up with US-developed LLMs, Tongyi Qianwen saw three of its models ranked among the world’s top 10 open-source models by AI developer platform Hugging Face in June.
At last year’s Apsara Conference, the cloud unit released the 2.0 version of Tongyi Qianwen, offering stronger capabilities in understanding complex instructions and reducing so-called hallucinations, which are incorrect or misleading results generated by AI. Joe Tsai, co-founder and chairman of Alibaba, said at the time that 80 per cent of China’s tech firms and half of the country’s large model AI companies were running on Alibaba Cloud.
China’s major AI start-ups, including Moonshot AI, StepFun and Shengshu Technology, are expected to share their LLM experiences in a panel discussion around the theme of “The Road to AGI”. LLMs are the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT.
China’s Big Tech companies and its AI start-ups are engaged in a heated battle to develop and commercialise their own LLMs, with more than 200 local LLMs appearing since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Global players like OpenAI and Google are locked out of the mainland Chinese market.
