As artificial intelligence sweeps across the global technology landscape, China's internet giants are making strategic moves to secure their positions. If search engines were the gateway to the internet era, large language models may well become the key to the future intelligent world. Alibaba, once part of China's dominant tech trio alongside Baidu and Tencent, has now entered this competitive arena with its self-developed large language model called "Tongyi Qianwen."
The Legacy and Transformation of China's BAT Tech Giants
Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—collectively known as BAT—once stood as pillars of China's internet industry, shaping the trajectory of digital development in the country. Each established dominance in distinct sectors, building expansive commercial ecosystems.
- Baidu: Originating as a search engine, it long maintained over 80% market share in China's search market. Its core technology infrastructure and user data laid groundwork for subsequent AI development.
- Alibaba: Built around e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall, it commands more than 50% of China's online retail market. Its expansion into cloud computing and fintech has grown increasingly significant.
- Tencent: Leveraging social apps WeChat and QQ, it controls massive user traffic with strong positions in mobile payments and gaming. Its AI investments focus primarily on natural language processing and computer vision.
The rise of mobile internet and AI technologies presents both challenges and opportunities for these established players, prompting increased investment in artificial intelligence to maintain technological leadership.
The Large Language Model Competition: ERNIE Bot vs. Tongyi Qianwen
In the large language model era, competition among BAT companies centers on natural language processing. Baidu took the lead with its generative AI product "ERNIE Bot," which attracted significant attention. Built on years of AI research, ERNIE Bot aims to deliver personalized conversational assistance. Alibaba followed closely with the release of "Tongyi Qianwen," officially joining the large language model race.
Tongyi Qianwen: Alibaba's Strategic AI Vision
The launch of Tongyi Qianwen marks a new phase in Alibaba's artificial intelligence strategy. The company began research on Chinese language models as early as 2020. By 2021, Alibaba had released multiple large models including M6—a multimodal pretrained language model with over 100 billion parameters—and PLUG, a Chinese pretrained language model with 27 billion parameters.
These models have demonstrated strong capabilities across question answering, dialogue systems, text generation, visual question answering, image generation, and video understanding, with several achieving commercial implementation. For instance, PLUG excels in Q&A applications, while M6 serves as an AI design assistant on Alibaba's manufacturing platform Xunxi, combining fashion trends with rapid design prototyping to potentially shorten production cycles for fast fashion.
Alibaba's Open-Source Contributions
Beyond proprietary development, Alibaba has open-sourced more than ten core models exceeding 10 billion parameters each through its ModelScope community—the most substantial contribution among domestic open-source initiatives. The company also trained the world's first AI model with 10 trillion parameters. These efforts showcase Alibaba's technical capabilities while advancing the broader AI ecosystem.
Cultural Nuances in Model Naming
Notably, Chinese tech firms appear to incorporate cultural heritage in naming their AI models. Names like "ERNIE Bot" (literally "Literary Mind One Word") and "Tongyi Qianwen" ("Universal Understanding Thousand Questions") reflect traditional Chinese values surrounding language and wisdom. Observers have humorously noted that following this naming pattern—using numerical classifiers like "one," "ten," "hundred," "thousand," "ten thousand," "hundred million," and "trillion"—Chinese companies may eventually exhaust available quantifiers. This phenomenon subtly demonstrates how cultural confidence manifests in technological innovation.
The Road Ahead for Large Language Models
With Tongyi Qianwen's debut, competition in China's large model sector intensifies. Major internet corporations will continue investing heavily in AI to drive technological progress and expand practical applications. Future implementations may transform customer service, content creation, education, healthcare, and other fields, bringing increased convenience to daily life.
The full potential of Tongyi Qianwen remains to be seen, but its arrival signals another significant step in China's AI development journey.