Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese tech heavyweight Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, announced on Thursday that its large language model Tongyi Qianwen, a potential rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT, has been made open source.

Boasting 7 billion parameters, the LLM could be put into commercial use for free, a move that makes Alibaba Cloud become the first tech company to join into the open-source LLM ecosystem.

The open-source ecosystem is crucial for promoting the technical advancement and industrial application of Chinese LLMs, the company said.

Alibaba Cloud emphasized that the open-source LLM will help enterprises simplify the process of model training and deployment, lower threshold for the application of LLM and establish their own customized AI models at a faster pace.

The company has also vowed to make computing and AI services more accessible and inclusive for enterprises and developers, offer more enterprises access to Tongyi Qianwen, and help them build tailor-made industry-specific LLMs.

LLMs refer to computer algorithms that are trained with huge amounts of data and are capable of generating content such as images, text, audio and video. They are the key technology underpinning AI chatbot ChatGPT.

As of May, China had developed at least 79 AI large language models, or rivals of ChatGPT, according to a report released by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China.

fanfeifei@chinadaily.com.cn