Alibaba Cloud to kick off annual Apsara tech event with focus on AI

Alibaba Group Holding's cloud unit is set to kick off its annual tech event this week, as China's largest cloud service provider brings together large language model (LLM) start-ups to discuss the future of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Eddie Wu Yongming, chief executive of both Alibaba and its cloud unit, will deliver a keynote speech on Thursday morning to open the Apsara Conference 2024 to rally the country's AI community, according to an agenda released by Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The event, which runs from Thursday to Saturday in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province where Alibaba is headquartered, will feature three main forums - AI, Cloud Computing and Application Practice - as well as over 400 sessions that bring together leading tech executives and experts to discuss trends in cloud and AI.

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A visitor learns about a large language model (LLM) developed for the field of lunar science during the China International Big Data Industry Expo in Guiyang, capital of southwestern Guizhou province, on August 29, 2024. Photo: Xinhua alt=A visitor learns about a large language model (LLM) developed for the field of lunar science during the China International Big Data Industry Expo in Guiyang, capital of southwestern Guizhou province, on August 29, 2024. Photo: Xinhua>

Alibaba Cloud, which is doubling down on its self-developed Tongyi Qianwen family of LLMs, is likely to release new AI products at the event, including a video generation LLM, according to Chinese media reports on Wednesday. Regarded as one of China's best hopes to catch up with US-developed LLMs, Tongyi Qianwen saw three of its models ranked among the world's top 10 open-source models by AI developer platform Hugging Face in June.

At last year's Apsara Conference, the cloud unit released the 2.0 version of Tongyi Qianwen, offering stronger capabilities in understanding complex instructions and reducing so-called hallucinations, which are incorrect or misleading results generated by AI. Joe Tsai, co-founder and chairman of Alibaba, said at the time that 80 per cent of China's tech firms and half of the country's large model AI companies were running on Alibaba Cloud.

China's major AI start-ups, including Moonshot AI, StepFun and Shengshu Technology, are expected to share their LLM experiences in a panel discussion around the theme of "The Road to AGI". LLMs are the technology underpinning generative AI services like ChatGPT.

China's Big Tech companies and its AI start-ups are engaged in a heated battle to develop and commercialise their own LLMs, with more than 200 local LLMs appearing since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Global players like OpenAI and Google are locked out of the mainland Chinese market.

Shengshu Technology co-founder and chief executive Tang Jiayu unveils a new AI video tool. Photo: Ben Jiang alt=Shengshu Technology co-founder and chief executive Tang Jiayu unveils a new AI video tool. Photo: Ben Jiang>

Autonomous driving and humanoid robots, two applications powered by LLMs, will also be major topics at the Apsara main forum on Thursday.

He Xiaopeng, founder of Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng, is expected to speak about how generative AI is reshaping autonomous driving, and he will be joined by an executive from the automotive unit of US chip giant Nvidia.

The conference comes at a time when China is facing a new round of chip restrictions from the US and its allies. The restrictions could pose further challenges for Chinese LLM developers, who are already struggling with limited access to the most advanced AI chips from Nvidia that are required to train AI models.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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