The race toward AI supremacy among global tech leaders took on a quick turn in 2023 with the pervasive introduction of generative AI. What are Asia’s tech giants doing about this megatrend?

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2023, Alibaba Cloud announced some of its AI-related innovations.

Looking at the Asia tech giant’s AI innovations, DigiconAsia discussed AI trends and issues with Raymond Ma, Vice President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, and General Manager of South APAC Region, Alibaba Cloud.

In your opinion, why and how should access to AI technologies be democratized?

Raymond Ma: Three key reasons:

    • Democratization bolsters competitiveness. In our interconnected world, staying competitive hinges on keeping pace with AI advancements. Broad access to AI ensures that nations and businesses can maintain their edge in the global marketplace.
    • Democratization promotes inclusivity and reduces bias. A diverse AI ecosystem is less prone to algorithmic discrimination, and by making AI accessible, a broader range of perspectives contributes to fairer, more ethical AI solutions.
    • Democratization also empowers smaller businesses and startups. These enterprises often lack the resources for AI development. Alibaba Cloud’s accessible AI tools enable them to compete and innovate.
Raymond Ma, Vice President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, and General Manager of South APAC Region, Alibaba Cloud

That’s why Alibaba Cloud has built ModelScope, a leading open-source AI model community for models and related tools & services, which is very popular among developers. The community hosted over 1,000 AI models, including Meta’s recently released Llama2 and our own open-source model, the seven billion-parameter version of Tongyi Qianwen. 

We believe the aggregation and engagement of a model ecosystem will significantly help developers optimize their models.

What are Alibaba Cloud’s policies on responsible and ethical AI?

Ma: Alibaba Cloud is committed to upholding a set of foundational principles to guide its responsible and ethical use of AI technology. These principles have been put forth by Alibaba’s Technology Ethics Committee and are central to their approach to AI development. 

The six core principles proposed by the committee are: being human-centric, inclusiveness and integrity, safety and reliability, privacy protection, being trustable and accountable, and openness and collaboration.

 By adhering to these principles, Alibaba Cloud aims to not only develop AI technologies that are responsible and ethical but also contribute to the sustainable advancement of technology for the greater good, creating value for both current and future generations and promoting long-term economic growth.

How is Tongyi Wanxiang for image generation empowering businesses to create innovative AI art and creative expressions, and what key industries is this solution helping to change the way visual content is approached?

Ma: Tongyi Wanxiang represents another significant milestone in Alibaba Cloud’s pursuit of advanced generative AI models.

The generative AI model is adept at handling various tasks, responding to text prompts in Chinese and English to generate detailed images in an array of styles, encompassing watercolors, oil and Chinese painting to animation, sketch, flat illustration, and 3D cartoons. 

Moreover, the model can transform any image into a new one with a similar style and stylize images through style transfer, which preserves the content of the original image while applying the visual style of another picture.

Powered by Alibaba Cloud’s trailblazing technologies in knowledge arrangement, visual AI and natural language processing (NLP), the model leverages multilingual materials for enhanced training. It boasts a robust semantic comprehension capability, resulting in more accurate and contextually relevant image generation.

Additionally, by optimizing the high-resolution diffusion process based on the signal-to-noise ratio, the model can strike a balance between composition accuracy and detail sharpness while enhancing its ability to generate high-contrast, visually stunning images with clean backgrounds.

Tongyi Wanxiang was developed using Composer, Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary large model that enables greater control over the final image output, such as spatial layout and palette, while maintaining image synthesis quality and creativity.

With the release of Tongyi Wanxiang, high-quality generative AI imagery will become more accessible, facilitating the development of innovative AI art and creative expressions for businesses across a wide range of sectors, including e-commerce, gaming, design and advertising.

What is ModelScopeGPT, and how does it enable complex AI tasks for enterprises and developers?

Ma: ModelScopeGPT is a powerful framework designed by Alibaba Cloud to harness the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) available on the platform. 

ModelScopeGPT will use LLMs as a controller to connect an extensive array of domain-specific expert models in the ModelScope open-source community. 

Built within the rich Model-as-a-Service ecosystem, ModelScopeGPT leverages the various AI capabilities offered on Alibaba Cloud. 

Enterprises and developers can leverage ModelScopeGPT for free to access and execute the best-suited models for performing sophisticated AI tasks based on users’ requests, such as developing multilingual videos.

What do you envision the future of AI to be, especially in Asia Pacific, in terms of its potential applications across industries, and evolving innovations in the AI space?

Ma: As a region known for its diverse economies and rapid technological adoption, Asia Pacific is poised to become a global leader in AI Innovation, defined by transformative applications across industries such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing and beyond.

Evolving innovations in the AI space will likely focus on enhancing the capabilities of machine learning models and systems allowing for the handling of increasingly complex tasks with enhanced accuracy and empowering more seamless human-machine interactions.

Moreover, in this exciting era of disruptive breakthroughs initiated by generative AI, computing power is essential. We believe the high-performance computing power required for model training and services will open up brand-new opportunities for cloud computing services.