Alibaba All-In on AI Infrastructure with Release of Over 100 Open-Source Models

TMTPost -- Alibaba Group showcases its determination of all-in on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure at Apsara Conference 2024, an annual tech event organized by Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group (Alibaba Cloud) in Hangzhou Yunqi Town, China.

Credit：Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud announced Thursday it has released over 100 of its newly-launched large language models, Qwen 2.5, to the global open-source community.The newly released open-source Qwen 2.5 models, ranging from 0.5 to 72 billion parameters in size, feature enhanced knowledge and stronger capabilities in math and coding and support over 29 languages, catering to a wide array of AI applications both at the edge or in the cloud across various sectors from automobile, gaming to science research.

As Alibaba Cloud’s portfolio of proprietary large language models, the Qwen model series have achieved remarkable traction since its debut in April 2023, according to the cloud unit. To date, the Qwen models have surpassed 40 million downloads across platforms such as Hugging Face and ModelScope, an open-source community initiative by Alibaba. Furthermore, these models have inspired the creation of over 50,000 models on Hugging Face.

The latest Qwen version, Qwen 2.5, was unveiled with over 100 models being made open-source. This extensive range includes base models, instruct models, and quantized models of various precision levels and methods, spanning different modalities such as language, audio, and vision, along with specialized code and mathematical models.

“Today marks a significant milestone as we launch our most expansive open-source initiative to date," said Jingren Zhou, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Alibaba Cloud. "This initiative is set to empower developers and corporations of all sizes, enhancing their ability to leverage AI technologies and further stimulating the growth of the open-source community. We remain committed to investing in advanced AI infrastructure to foster the widespread adoption of generative AI technologies across different industries."

Alibaba Cloud announced an upgrade to its proprietary flagship model Qwen-Max at Apsara Conference 2024. The enhanced Qwen-Max model demonstrates performance on par with other state-of-the-art models in areas such as language comprehension and reasoning, math, and coding.

In addition to an extensive suite of large language models, Alibaba Cloud also presented a new text-to-video model as part of its image generator, Tongyi Wanxiang large model family. The new model is capable of generating high-quality videos in a wide variety of visual styles from realistic scenes to 3D animation. The model can generate videos based on Chinese and English text instruction and transform static images into dynamic videos. The model features advanced diffusion transformer (DiT) architecture to enhance video reconstruction quality.

At its annual flagship event, Alibaba Cloud announced a slew of updates to its full-stack AI infrastructure covering green datacenter architecture, data management, model training and inferencing. First, It revealed its next-generation data center architecture, CUBE DC 5.0. The new CUBE architecture increases energy and operational efficiency and and reduces deployment times by up to 50% compared to traditional data center builds through prefabricated modular designs.

Second, Alibaba Cloud introduces Alibaba Cloud Open Lake which can seamlessly integrate big data engines into a unified solution, maximizing data utility especially for generative AI applications. has launched PAI AI Scheduler with integrated model training and inference, a proprietary cloud-native scheduling engine designed to enhance computing resource management. The AI Scheduler can achieve over 90% of effective compute utilization rate.

Third, Alibaba Cloud introduced DMS: OneMeta+OneOps, a platform that enables a unified management of over 40 types of data sources in database, data warehouse, and data lake across multiple cloud environments. The platform will boost data utilization rate by 10 times, significantly enhancing the efficiency of transforming data into valuable intelligence.

Last but not least, Alibaba Cloud introduced the 9th Generation Enterprise Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance during the conference. The latest generation of ECS instances has notable performance enhancements, including a 30% increase in search recommendation speed and a 17% improvement in the effectiveness of reading and writing Queries Per Second (QPS) when applying to database products compared to the previous generation.