Chinese technology giant %Alibaba ($BABA) has introduced an advanced %ArtificialIntelligence (A.I.) model that can recognize images and hold more complex conversations with people.
Alibaba said that its two new A.I. models, Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat, will be open sourced, meaning that researchers, academics and companies worldwide can use them to create their own artificial intelligence applications without needing to train their own systems.
The new models are seen as a major advance in A.I., one that will save users time and money.
Alibaba said that Qwen-VL can respond to open-ended questions related to different images and generate picture captions in a matter of seconds.
Qwen-VL-Chat offers more complex interactions with human beings, according to the company. Specifically, Qwen-VL-Chat can write complex stories, create images based on photographs, and solve advanced mathematical equations.
Alibaba’s two new A.I. models are built on the company’s large language model called Tongyi Qianwen, which was released earlier this year.
A large language model is an A.I. model that has been trained on huge amounts of data, mostly gleaned from the internet.
The open-source distribution of Alibaba’s new A.I. models will help the company attract more users at a time when the firm’s cloud division is looking to boost growth and preparing to go public on its own.
Alibaba’s new A.I. models also come amid an intensifying global race to develop advanced artificial intelligence applications. The race includes leading technology companies such as %Alphabet ($GOOGL) and %Microsoft ($MSFT), among many others.