Alibaba and ByteDance Intensify AI Race Despite Rule Tightening

BEIJING, April 11 (TMTPOST)— Top Chinese tech companies are stepping up their work in artificial intelligence (AI) even as the government moves to tighten up scrutiny on the sector.

Source: Visual China

Alibaba now has its own generative large language model (LLM) Tongyi Qianwen, which can possess both English and Chinese capabilities and empower the application just like Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The model will be integrated into all Alibaba offerings and first be deployed on DingTalk, an enterprise communication and collaboration platform, and the smart speaker Tmall Genie, the company said at Alibaba Cloud Summit on Tuesday.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit, has developed its full-stack AI technology portfolio, including the computing operating system Apsara, chips and the intelligent computing platform. It will open up these AI infrastructures and LLM resources to any other companies to improve development of the industry. With the help of Tongyi Qianwen, Alibaba Cloud will eventually provide each business client an exclusive space for them to train their LLM for specific scenarios.

“All the softwares are worthy of access to LLM for upgrades. We will open up Tongyi Qianwen for any company to create their own GPT, a pre-trained language model,” Zhou Jingren, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said at the summit.

Tuesday also saw Lark Suite, an enterprise collaboration platform created by TikTok parent ByteDance, was said to roll out an intelligent assistant named My AI, without definite timetable about its public test and launch. The product can help users to automatically summarize meeting minutes, creating reports, improve the text content and complete the unfinished writing; moreover, it is useful for Lark app users for automatic schedule creating and search in the knowledge base inside by means of dialogue.

Earlier that day, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released a draft for a new regulation on AI-based generative contents and services, the first of the kind in China since the launch of ChatGPT last November. Companies to offer generative AI services shall require users to provide real identity information and take steps to avoid generating false information for the content generated by such AI services shall be true and accurate, according to the draft. Providers for ways including programmable interfaces to support generative AI contents such as texts and images shall take responsibility as the creator of the content produced by the product, and they have to protect personal information if their possessions involve individual users’ information.

CAC also wants AI-powered content to align with socialist values.  “The content produced by generative AI should align with core socialist values. No content that attempts to overthrow the government, the socialist system, or foment to split the country, hurt the national unity, preach terrorism, extremism, ethnic hatred, ethnic discrimination, violence, obscene and pornographic information or content that may disrupt the economic and social order should be allowed,” reads Article 4.1. Providers shall prevent re-generation through model optimization training and other methods within 3 months if users claim their generative content doesn’t meet regulatory requirements of the draft.  

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