According to Yahoo Finance, Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Zhipu announced on Tuesday the completion of its latest funding round, having previously received investments from internet giants such as Alibaba and Tencent last year. The statement reveals that Zhipu's commercial revenue has more than doubled this year. Zhipu is one of the few AI startups in China valued at billions of dollars, receiving substantial investment from local tech giants. In May of this year, Saudi Aramco's venture capital division participated in Zhipu's $400 million funding round, bringing its valuation to approximately $3 billion. AI development.

The Alibaba Tongyi Laboratory voice team announced that its open-source voice generation model CosyVoice has been upgraded to version 2.0. This upgrade marks significant progress in voice generation technology in terms of accuracy, stability, and natural experience. CosyVoice 2.0 achieves bidirectional streaming voice synthesis through the integration of offline and streaming modeling techniques, allowing for a first-package synthesis delay of up to 150ms, thereby significantly improving the responsiveness of voice synthesis.

According to Guangzhou Daily, on December 6th, news that 'ByteDance lured away Alibaba's large model talent with an eight-figure salary' quickly sparked heated discussions on social media. Reports indicate that Zhou Chang, the former technical leader of Alibaba's 'Tongyi Qianwen' large model, announced his departure to start a new venture on July 18 this year, but just two months later, there are reports that Zhou has quietly joined ByteDance. This news has been confirmed by relevant personnel from ByteDance. It is reported that Zhou's move is not a solo endeavor; more than ten members of his team have also joined him at ByteDance.

Alibaba's Damo Academy Tongyi Lab recently announced the open sourcing of a voice processing technology called ClearerVoice-Studio, aimed at enhancing voice quality and intelligibility. As voice technology becomes more widely used, voice quality is gaining increasing attention, especially in situations involving background noise, reverberation, and device pickup, leading to a growing demand for voice processing technology.

Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, has announced a comprehensive partnership with Meizu. The two parties will work together to promote the application of cloud computing and large model technologies across multiple fields, including smartphones, smart wearable devices, and smart cars. This collaboration aims to deepen technological integration and expand the boundaries of products and services.

Recently, Alibaba announced the open sourcing of its latest image generation model, Qwen2vl-Flux. This model not only features a variety of functionalities such as editing, fusion, and mixing, but it can also generate highly similar new images based on user-input images or text. Qwen2vl-Flux provides powerful image transformation capabilities. Users simply need to input an image without any text prompts, and the model can generate multiple similar images based on the original. For example, if a user uploads a portrait photo, the model can generate multiple angles.

The Alibaba International AI team has recently released a new reasoning model called Marco-o1, which focuses on solving open-ended questions, extending beyond traditional subjects with standard answers such as programming and mathematics. The research team is dedicated to exploring whether such models can be effectively adapted to fields that are difficult to quantify and lack clear rewards.

During the 2024 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming delivered a keynote speech at the Internet Entrepreneurs Forum on November 21, emphasizing the profound impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the internet industry. He pointed out that the biggest change in the internet industry this year is still the rapid development of AI technology. Wu Yongming stated that the greatest value of AI is not merely the development of one or two super apps on mobile phones, but in driving productivity transformation across various industries. The development of AI requires a prosperous ecosystem of technology, products, and market.

At the main forum of the 2024 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming delivered a speech on the company's strategy in the era of artificial intelligence. Wu Yongming emphasized that Alibaba is committed to doing two things: first, continuously improving artificial intelligence infrastructure and related support systems; second, adhering to open source and openness, collaborating with ecological partners to transform AI capabilities into productivity across various industries.

On November 15, Alibaba Tongyi Lab launched the Code Mode, a feature that enables users to generate various applications through simple everyday language instructions, including mini games, data charts, websites, and resumes. Users can experience this new interactive method by visiting the Tongyi web version (tongyi.ai) and clicking on 'Code Mode' in the input box.

Alibaba's DAMO Academy (Lakeside Laboratory) has announced a significant breakthrough in Beijing: the 'Baguan' meteorological big model developed based on global meteorological models. This innovative model, named 'Baguan' (meaning 'Insight from All Directions, Observing All Phenomena'), elevates weather forecasting accuracy to unprecedented levels. The most remarkable feature of this meteorological big model is its ultra-high accuracy. By integrating multi-source regional data, the model achieves an ultra-fine prediction resolution of 1 km × 1 km × 1 hour. In practical applications, this model predicts key meteorological indicators with greater accuracy compared to traditional forecasts.

Recent research from Alibaba's Tongyi Laboratory indicates that existing text-to-image Diffusion Transformer models already possess the ability to generate multiple images with specific relational contexts. With just a little 'guidance', they can achieve a synthesis of understanding and produce high-quality multi-image collections. Traditional Diffusion models are more like 'rote learning' students, requiring massive datasets to generate high-quality images. However, with the support of IC-LoRA, they become 'high-achieving students', capable of learning through analogy.

Alibaba recently launched the new AI portrait generation project EcomID, along with its native implementation plugin for ComfyUI. This tool marks a significant breakthrough in the currently popular AI portrait generation field, perfectly inheriting the advantages of InstantID and PulID while achieving innovations in several key metrics. On a technical level, EcomID employs an innovative architectural design. The project draws inspiration from PuLID's ID-Encoder and cross-attention components, significantly reducing training loss through alignment.