'ChatGPT Rival'... Alibaba Unveils AI Chatbot 'Tongyi Qianwen'

An AI chatbot named 'Tongyi Qianwen,' known as a rival to 'ChatGPT,' has been unveiled.

According to Bloomberg and the Hong Kong South China Morning Post (SCMP) on the 9th, China's largest e-commerce company Alibaba limitedly released the AI chatbot 'Tongyi Qianwen' to some corporate clients on the 7th.

Alibaba's cloud division announced through its official WeChat account that it would release the beta version of 'Tongyi Qianwen' and provided invitation codes to some corporate clients to test it.

'Tongyi Qianwen' is a name borrowed from Mencius's phrase "the truth from a thousand questions." Currently, the chatbot is only available in Chinese.

SCMP explained, "On the homepage of 'Tongyi Qianwen,' the chatbot is described merely as a 'productivity assistant and idea generator that responds to human commands using a large language model (LLM),' with almost no detailed explanation of its functions."

After reports emerged that Alibaba plans to launch the AI chatbot this month, Alibaba's stock price rose by 2.5% on the Hong Kong stock exchange on the 6th.

Following the release of ChatGPT by the U.S. company OpenAI, the Chinese information technology (IT) industry is also actively developing AI chatbots.

On the 16th of last month, China's largest search engine Baidu unveiled its AI chatbot 'Ernie Bot.' Baidu's CEO Robin Li claimed, "Ernie Bot is only one or two months behind ChatGPT."

Tencent, Meituan co-founder Wang Huiyuan, and Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochan have also joined the AI chatbot development trend.

SCMP reported, "So far, very few people on social media have been able to test Tongyi Qianwen, but posts comparing Tongyi Qianwen with ChatGPT and Baidu's 'Ernie Bot' have already appeared."

Alibaba is preparing for its annual event, the 'Cloud Summit,' on the 11th, where the CEO of Alibaba Cloud is scheduled to give a speech.