As the wave of technology sweeps across the globe, generative AI has undoubtedly become a focal point. However, Wu Yongming from Alibaba has presented a deeper insight: the true value of generative AI goes beyond creating dazzling applications; it lies in fundamentally changing the way we interact with the physical world. Wu keenly pointed out that people often fall into the thinking trap of 'overestimating short-term effects while underestimating long-term impacts' in the face of a new technological revolution. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the current fervor surrounding generative AI, with the public generally focusing on the immediate tangible effects that AI can bring.

The 2024 Yunqi Conference opened grandly in Hangzhou, with Alibaba Group CEO and Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group Chairman and CEO Wu Yongming delivering a keynote speech. During the conference, Alibaba announced a series of groundbreaking releases, including the launch of the next-generation open-source model Qwen2.5, which outperforms Llama405B and firmly holds the position of the 'strongest open-source large model'.

At the 2024 Hangzhou Cloud Habitat Conference, Alibaba Cloud announced the newly upgraded Tongyi Lingma. The upgraded Tongyi Lingma can now quickly complete multiple development tasks such as understanding requirements, breaking down tasks, writing code, fixing bugs, and testing with just a few sentences. Before the upgrade, Tongyi Lingma could only perform basic auxiliary programming tasks. This advancement greatly benefits developers, allowing them to develop an application from scratch in just a few minutes, with an increase in development efficiency by several dozen times! It is reported that since the launch of Tongyi Lingma, it has successfully been adopted by many well-known enterprises, including

Alibaba Group's Tongyi announced that its latest developed AI video generation large model - Tongyi Wanxiang AI Video Generation, is officially online. This technology, with its powerful visual dynamic generation capability, can quickly generate video content with various artistic styles and cinematic quality based on text prompts.

During the opening ceremony of the 2024 Yunqi Conference held today, Wu Yongming, director and CEO of Alibaba Group, as well as chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group, delivered a speech sharing profound insights on the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He revealed that over the past year, the call price for the Tongyi Qianwen API on Alibaba Cloud's Bai Lian has dramatically dropped by 97%, with the cost of calling one million tokens now as low as 0.5 yuan, and Alibaba Cloud will continue to strive to reduce costs.

The Tongyi Qianwen team announced the official open source of the latest member of the Qwen family, the Qwen2.5 series language models, three months after the Qwen2 release. This marks one of the largest open source releases in history, including the general language model Qwen2.5, as well as the Qwen2.5-Coder and Qwen2.5-Math models specifically designed for programming and mathematics.

Alibaba's Tongyi is set to unveil its video generation large model at the upcoming Yunqi Conference, attracting significant attention from the industry. Currently, the Tongyi App channel and Tongyi Wanxiang PC version have quietly launched the 'Video Generation' entry, although the functionality is not yet open and users can only make reservations. According to page information, this new video generation large model is independently developed by Alibaba's Tongyi Laboratory, featuring two main creation modes: 'Text-to-Video' and 'Image-to-Video', allowing users to generate corresponding video content from text or images. This launch will undoubtedly bring new opportunities for content creators.

Connectly.ai, an AI service company aiding retailers in selling on messaging platforms, secured $20M in Series B funding led by Alibaba. The funds will expand its platform and increase San Francisco staff to 80 by year-end. Founded by Stefanos Loukakos, the platform integrates services like WhatsApp and SMS for personalized customer engagement, aiming for 100% revenue growth in 2024.....

On the occasion of Alibaba's 25th anniversary, the company's founder Jack Ma delivered an inspiring speech on the internal website. Ma emphasized that Alibaba's success is attributed to its unwavering commitment to idealism, belief in the power of the market and the value of innovation, and the conviction that only companies that create genuine value for society can endure.

Alibaba Group's Tongyi Qwen QwenLM project has encountered an unexpected takedown of its Github page, resulting in a 404 error message when users try to access it. Project leader Lin Junyang responded in a social media post, stating that the team has not disappeared and is in communication with officials to resolve the page takedown issue. Despite the team's efforts, the page remains inaccessible. It is worth noting that the team recently released the Qwen2-VL model, which has excelled in processing video content up to 20 minutes long, surpassing multiple authoritative evaluation metrics for multimodal models, with some metrics even exceeding those of GPT.

Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Large Model platform has launched a free 'PPT Creation' feature, simplifying the PPT production process through independent research and development. It supports intelligent content generation, beautiful design, and smart arrangement. Users only need to input text or upload documents for the system to automatically generate outlines and create content. The design relies on the Tongyi Wanxiang visual large model to ensure high relevance between images and themes. This feature offers various templates to meet needs such as work reports, academic presentations, and daily sharing. In addition, the Tongyi web version has upgraded its 'Real-time Recording' and 'Reading Assistant' features.

Alibaba's cloud computing division has released the new AI model Qwen2-VL, which possesses strong capabilities to understand visual content. It can analyze videos lasting up to 20 minutes in real-time, summarize the video content, answer related questions, and provide online chat support. In third-party benchmark tests, Qwen2-VL surpassed several metrics including Meta's Llama 3.1, OpenAI's GPT-4o, Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku, and Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash.

On August 30, 2024, Alibaba Damo Academy's Tongyi Qianwen team announced a significant update to its latest achievement—the Qwen2-VL model. The Qwen2-VL model has achieved remarkable improvements in image understanding, video processing, and multilingual support, setting new benchmarks for key performance indicators.

In 2023, China's AI public cloud service market showed strong growth, reaching a scale of 12.61 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 58.2%. Large models play a key role in driving innovation in generative AI applications and the implementation of traditional AI applications. Baidu Intelligent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud rank first in the market, with Tencent Cloud following closely behind, and Huawei Cloud in third place, indicating fierce market competition. The report pays special attention to market services such as computer vision, conversational AI, and intelligent voice, in which Tencent Cloud, Baidu Intelligent Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud dominate. In addition, natural language...

Tongyi Qianwen has launched a new domain 'tongyi.ai' and introduced new features including deep search capabilities to enhance user experience. The new web-based chat function supports deep search, providing professional and structured search results, displaying source webpages through digital badges, and offering one-click jump links. The app upgrade also adds an image micro motion effect feature that supports multi-size image uploads, optimizes the custom performance function, solving long audio upload issues by extending upload duration from 120 seconds to 300 seconds, while also introducing 3:4 aspect ratio support to meet user needs.

The latest release from the Alibaba team, mPLUG-Owl3 is a general-purpose multi-modal large model, with its core capability being the understanding of long image sequences. By introducing a hyper attention module, mPLUG-Owl3 can efficiently process visual and language information, achieving in-depth understanding and communication of multi-modal data such as images and videos. This model has made significant breakthroughs in inference efficiency, image processing capabilities, and the application of multi-modal knowledge, particularly in video understanding, where it can 'watch' a 2-hour movie in 4 seconds and accurately answer related questions.

Alibaba Group recently released its financial report for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, highlighting the outstanding performance of Alibaba Cloud. The report shows that Alibaba Cloud's revenue grew by 6% year-on-year, reaching 26.549 billion yuan, with AI-related product revenue achieving triple-digit growth and public cloud business also realizing double-digit growth. Adjusted EBITA profit increased by 155% year-on-year, reaching 2.337 billion yuan.

The research team at Alibaba Group has released a new framework called UniPortrait, which focuses on personalized processing of portrait images, including single-character consistency, multi-character consistency, and style reference. UniPortrait is specifically designed with two modules: ID embedding and ID routing, which maintain a high level of realism in facial features, support a broad range of facial editing capabilities, and even allow users to generate images using free-form text descriptions without a fixed layout. Through a two-phase training scheme, UniPo

On August 12, the e-commerce platform 1688 announced the launch of a new initiative called 'Efficiency Improvement and Revenue Increase', designed specifically for source manufacturers in industrial belts to aid in their business growth and efficiency enhancement. As part of this initiative, 1688 will offer merchants a free 'AI Business Assistant' service to help new merchants ensure a stable order volume, number of customers, and reasonable profit margins.

Alibaba recently launched the new open-source voice model Qwen2-Audio, which excels in speech recognition, translation, and audio analysis, achieving significant performance improvements. Qwen2-Audio offers a basic version and an instruction fine-tuning version, supporting multiple languages such as Chinese, Cantonese, French, English, and Japanese, facilitating sentiment analysis and translation applications. Compared to Qwen-Audio, Qwen2-Audio features comprehensive optimizations in architecture and performance, utilizing more natural language prompts during the pre-training phase.