The Banking Executive Magazine - April 2023 Issue

ISSUE 172 APRIL 2023 the BANKING EXECUTIVE 51 FinTech and AI Chornicle Chinese tech giant Alibaba has un- veiled a ChatGPT rival and the abil- ity to create custom LLMs (Large Language Models) for customers. Alibaba’s ChatGPT rival is called Tongyi Qianwen and will be inte- grated across the company’s various businesses in the “near future,” but it is yet to give a rollout timeline. “We are at a technological water- shed moment driven by generative AI and cloud computing, and busi- nesses across all sectors have started to embrace intelligence transforma- tion to stay ahead of the game,” said Daniel Zhang, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “As a leading global cloud comput- ing service provider, Alibaba Cloud is committed to making computing and AI services more accessible and inclusive for enterprises and devel- opers, enabling them to uncover more insights, explore new business models for growth, and create more cutting-edge products and services for society.” Tongyi Qianwen roughly translates to “seeking an answer by asking a thou- sand questions” and will support both English and Chinese languages. Alibaba has stated that the chatbot will first be added to DingTalk, its workplace messaging app. Tongyi Qianwen will be able to perform sev- eral tasks at launch, including taking notes in meetings, writing emails, and drafting business proposals. The chatbot will be integrated into Tmall Genie, similar to Amazon’s line of Echo smart speakers. That in- tegration will give Alibaba an advan- tage over its Western counterparts such as Google which are yet to in- tegrate their own equivalents into their smart speakers. Tongyi Qianwen is powered by an LLM that reportedly consists of ten trillion parameters, which is signifi- cantly more than GPT-4 (estimated to consist of around one trillion param- eters.) The model will be used as the foun- dation for a new service by Alibaba that will see the company build cus- tom LLMs for customers. The LLMs will use “customers’ proprietary in- telligence and industrial know-how” to build AI-infused apps without de- veloping a model from scratch. A beta version of a Tongyi Qianwen API is already available for Chinese developers. “Generative AI powered by large lan- guage models is ushering in an un- precedented new phase. In this latest AI era, we can create additional value for our customers and broader communities through our resilient public cloud infrastructure and proven AI capabilities,” said Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelli- gence. “We are witnessing a new paradigm of AI development where cloud and AI models play an essential role. By making this paradigm more inclu- sive, we hope to facilitate businesses from all industries with their intelli- gence transformation and, ultimately, help boost their business productivity and expand their expertise and capa- bilities while unlocking more excit- ing opportunities through innovations.” Last month, a group of high-profile figures in the technology industry called for the suspension of training powerful AI systems. Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak were among those who signed an open letter warning of potential risks and said the race to develop AI systems is out of control. A report by investment bank Gold- man Sachs estimated that AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs. An AI think tank, meanwhile, called GPT-4 a risk to public safety. Alibaba’s announcements were made at its Cloud Summit, which also featured the debut of three- month trials for its Infrastructure-as- a-Service (IaaS) and PolarDB services. The company is offering a 50 percent discount for its storage-as- a-service offering if users reserve ca- pacity in a specific region for a year. The company has not yet revealed the cost of using Tongyi Qianwen. ALIBABA UNVEILS CHATGPT RIVAL AND CUSTOM LLMS