Alibaba’s most recent move is in line with its overarching plan to increase foreign investments in strategic global markets.
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing services and artificial intelligence (AI) division of Alibaba Group Holding has unveiled a new set of packages of its proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) and development tools for international developers.
Alibaba Cloud, based in Hangzhou, announced at its annual developer summit in Indonesia on Tuesday that its generative AI (GenAI) development platform, Model Studio, now offers application programming interfaces (APIs) for global developers to access the latest products under its Tongyi Qianwen family of LLMs, such as the Qwen 2.5 series, and multimodal AI models, including the Qwen-VL series and the visual generation-focused Tongyi Wanxiang.
LLMs and API
GenAI services like ChatGPT are powered by LLMs. An API is a computer code collection that gives programmers the ability to synchronize data across many platforms in order to create application software. APIs aid in the acceleration of app development by removing the need to create code from scratch.
Guo Dongliang, vice-president of international business and head of international products and solutions at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, stated at the event that the company is dedicated to providing innovative AI models, improved cloud infrastructure, and easily accessible support programs to developers worldwide.
Backstory
Alibaba’s latest step is in line with the company’s overarching plan to increase its foreign investments and broaden its cloud infrastructure offering in strategic global markets.
In December 2024, the company stated that by 2025, it hopes to collaborate with 100 ecosystem partners to create and offer state-of-the-art AI and cloud computing solutions to companies in a range of global industries. It also announced at its developer summit that its Tongyi Lingma programming tool, which is based on the Qwen 2.5-coder concept, is now more widely available.
New AI Packages On The Offer
Some of the exciting capabilities that Alibaba Cloud’s AI Programmer offers developers include: code snippet search, code completion and optimization, debugging support, and batch unit test generation. These are all expected to boost productivity and enhance efficiency in software development.
Additionally, Model Studio has made a plethora of new AI development tools available to developers worldwide. They include:
- Agent: This package facilitates numerous cooperation for planning and task execution.
- Workflow: It divides complicated activities into smaller ones.
Alibaba Cloud shut down its data centers in Australia and India last year to focus on operations in other areas. They company is now making moves to increase investment in Southeast Asia, South Korea, and Mexico.
The cloud division which is one of Alibaba’s most significant growth engines, saw a 7% increase in revenue during the September quarter of last year, reaching 29.6 billion yuan (US$4 billion). Over the previous two years, that was the unit’s fastest quarterly growth.