Ant Group Co., the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., received approval from the Chinese government to roll out products powered by its large language model Bailing to the public.
Bailing will be applied to Ant’s various services and help with innovation, Xu Peng, vice president of Ant Group said in a statement on Monday.
Chinese tech firms from Alibaba to Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. have joined startups Baichuan and Zhipu to release ChatGPT-like products, joining a global race to capitalize on the potential of generative AI. Ant, the owner of Alipay, can leverage the popularity of the mobile payment service to gain more data and insight on user habits.
Hangzhou-based Alibaba has defined AI as one of its two core strategies as it goes through a six-way spinoff.
The government approval dovetails with efforts at Alibaba. On Monday, the company’s commerce unit also pushed out a suite of tools including chatbots for small businesses trying to expand overseas.
Last week, Alibaba Cloud – which now hosts half of China’s generative AI firms and serves about 80% of China’s technology companies – released Tongyi Qianwen 2.0. It also introduced several sector-focused models at the company’s annual tech conference in Hangzhou.
In September, Ant unveiled two applications powered by its financial large language model. One is known as Zhixiaobao, which answers questions for customers; and the other Zhixiaozhu is an assistant for financial professionals.
Photograph: Attendees at the Ant Group booth at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, in July 2023. Photo credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
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