New Delhi: China’s largest tech firm, Alibaba, announced this week it will create a “giant new AI model. This model would have 5000 to 1,000,000 of “parameters.” The more parameters the algorithm has, the more difficult and complex tasks it can execute: Just as a computer program learns from its parameters in the course of training, the more parameters, the more difficult and complex tasks the AI will be able to perform.
The company announced the move in a prominent tech conference in China called the Apsara Conference, where Eddie Wu, the CEO of the company, made the announcement. The AI team at Alibaba, dubbed “Qwen”, is still in the process of making the model smarter and better at solving long, tricky tasks, he said. The larger aim is to make strides toward what he calls “artificial superintelligence” artificial intelligence that eventually rivals or surpasses humans in myriad fields, he said.
The current best model released by Alibaba is called Qwen 3.8 Max, with 2.4 trillion parameters. This would mean that the new model planned would be 2 to 4 times larger.
The new model was accompanied by a new computer chip, dubbed Zhenwu V900, by Alibaba. According to Wu, the chip is the strongest Chinese-created AI chip to-date. It is three times faster than the business’s older chip, M890, and a single cluster comprised of this new chip can power up to 500,000 chips, training and running huge AI models.
The new chip is significant because companies in China are attempting to create their own chips, rather than relying on American firm Nvidia, amid American restrictions on shipment of high-performance graphics chips to China.
Alibaba also revealed its ambition to expand significantly in the coming few years. The firm aims to have its cloud data centers with a combined power capacity of over 20 Gigawatts worldwide by 2032, Wu said. He said the demand for AI is indeed high and is driving Alibaba Cloud’s business growth, but the lack of AI hardware supply chains are limiting the speed at which they can grow their business.
In general, this news reflects Alibaba’s drive to rival other key AI firms globally in developing more intelligent AI systems and in creating more sophisticated chips.
