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

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Signage outside the Alibaba Group Holding offices in Beijing, China, Jan. 17, 2023. Photo: Bloomberg

Ben Jiangin Beijing,Tracy Quin ShanghaiandCoco Fengin Beijing

Published: 12:15pm, 11 Apr 2023Updated: 12:28pm, 11 Apr 2023

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.

The keynote marks Zhang’s first public speech as Alibaba Cloud’s new CEO, after he took over the role last December following an outage of the service that led to its “longest major-scale failure” in a decade in Hong Kong and Macau.

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”.