Alibaba says its ChatGPT-like service will be integrated into all products, starting with DingTalk and Tmall Genie
- Tongyi Qianwen will first be integrated into DingTalk, the workplace and application development platform, and Tmall Genie, an IoT-enabled smart home appliance
- Large language models like Tongyi Qianwen could be used to provide conversational bots, or digital assistants, to Alibaba’s cloud clients, according to IDC China
Alibaba Group Holding plans to integrate its own ChatGPT-like service Tongyi Qianwen into all of its products, chairman and chief executive Daniel Zhang Yong said at the company’s annual Cloud Summit in Beijing on Tuesday.
“All Alibaba products will be integrated into our large [language] model [and] undergo a comprehensive upgrade,” Zhang, 51, said in his keynote address. “We hope this will take the intelligence of all Alibaba services to a whole new level, and enable things that were unimaginable before.”
With Chinese and English language capabilities, Tongyi Qianwen will first be integrated into DingTalk, Alibaba’s digital collaboration workplace and application development platform, and Tmall Genie, the company’s IoT-enabled smart home appliance.
Tongyi Qianwen is being made available to corporate clients in China for beta testing.
ChatGPT sparks investment frenzy and soul searching in China
Zhang did not mention the service breakdown during his half-hour keynote. On a conference call in February, Zhang said the cloud business, which includes Dingtalk, was “an opportunity of extreme strategic importance to Alibaba”.
In a January note, analysts at Shanghai-based capital market intelligence service SWS wrote, “With world-leading technologies we expect Ali Cloud to improve organisational efficiency, customer service and commercialisation under the leadership of [Zhang]”.
Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, saw its shares trading up by 1 per cent in Hong Kong at noon on Tuesday.
Despite stiff competition and a string of slower revenue growth in recent quarters, Alibaba’s cloud arm is still considered a major growth driver amid slower growth in the company’s e-commerce business.
In the December quarter, Ali Cloud’s revenue rose 3 per cent year-on-year to 20.18 billion yuan (US$2.92 billion), marking its slowest growth rate for 2022. Revenue growth was 12 per cent in the March quarter last year, and 10 per cent in the June quarter.
In 2022, the total cloud market in mainland China grew 10 per cent to US$30.3 billion, according to a March report by Canalys. The year closed out with only 4 per cent year-on-year growth to US$7.9 billion in the fourth quarter.
Last year’s growth was in contrast to the strong performances of the past few years when the market experienced annual growth rates of over 30 per cent, the report said.
Lu Yanxia, research director at IT consultancy IDC China, said large language models (LLMs) like Tongyi Qianwen could be used to provide conversational bots, or digital assistants, to Alibaba’s cloud clients.
However, the amount of new revenue from such applications will be relatively small in the short term, said Lu, although companies with well-performing LLMs will be able to see an upside to their revenue growth.
