Selling on Taobao e-commerce platform becomes easier with support from open source AI

At the World Internet Conference in Zhejiang (China), an annual gathering of the country's top Internet executives, as well as many government officials, Wu affirmed that "Alibaba is becoming an enterprise with an open technology platform, providing infrastructure for AI innovation and transformation in many different fields."

It is the first time the Alibaba co-founder has spoken publicly about the vision of the 24-year-old tech giant, which is undergoing a sweeping restructuring of its core business into six units, including e-commerce, cloud computing and entertainment.

95c9f0c7 4de3 4390 8fc6 4a6a1f04e0fe a82ee983.jpeg — The annual World Internet Conference is a gathering place for China's leading Internet companies.

SCMP quoted the head of China's largest Internet company, saying that Alibaba's e-commerce operations including Taobao and Tmall Group are still the pillars of the business, but the group's future depends on AI.

“Over the past two decades, China’s digital transformation has been largely consumer-driven, transforming the country into one of the world’s leading consumer internet powers,” Wu said. “In the AI era, Alibaba wants to become a technology platform serving society to innovate and transform into new technologies, in line with its original mission of making it easy to do business anywhere.”

With this goal in mind, the mainland e-commerce giant has laid out its strategy around two main themes, focusing on “users” and “AI dynamics.”

“In the near future, all the products we provide will change, and smarter generations of products will enter people’s lives,” Wu affirmed. “I believe that AI assistants will become common, both in learning and working. Every business will be equipped with AI assistants to help them adapt to the market better.”

Last week, Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai also highlighted the cloud unit’s goal of making AI an effective productivity tool for “small and medium-sized enterprises.” In September, Alibaba Cloud released Tongyi Qianwen, an LLM designed to support the same types of applications and tools as OpenAI’s GPT. Currently, OpenAI’s services such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 Turbo are not available in the mainland market.

Public figures from Alibaba show that more than half of China's large language models (LLMs) are running on the group's cloud service.

Personal virtual assistant on the online market

After its launch, Alibaba brought Tongyi Qianwen to its Taobao e-commerce platform to support customer care as well as provide more suitable search suggestions. The e-commerce platform's chatbot is interactive and offers suggestions in multiple formats, including text and short videos .

Tongyi Qianwen is seen as an alternative to GPT as OpenAI's chatbot is not available in the mainland market.

Beyond search capabilities, the AI assistant can also perform a variety of tasks, from creating detailed travel itineraries to composing product marketing posts. To use it, users simply need to search for Tongyi Qianwen on the Taobao app and click on the chatbot to interact.

The e-commerce giant, however, aims to allow users to build their own generative AI solutions around Tongyi Qianwen, rather than just a chatbot assistant. Alibaba launched Modelscope, a service platform that provides access to hundreds of pre-trained generative tools hosted on its cloud.

The open-source platform means anyone can freely change the code. But in return, anyone can look inside and learn exactly how the system works—something that isn’t the case with the GPT models that OpenAI is providing.

According to Forbes , part of the reason Alibaba decided to go open-source AI may be to comply with Beijing’s recently issued AI regulations. These rules are considered an interim measure to manage the booming AI sector, requiring public AI providers to “take effective measures to improve the transparency of their services.”

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