Alibaba strengthens commitment to open-source development of AI models amid debate over this strategy

Alibaba Group Holding has strengthened its commitment to the open-source development of its large language model (LLM) – the deep-learning technology used to train generative artificial intelligence services like ChatGPT – several months after Tongyi Qianwen was made available to third-party developers.

The e-commerce giant could have been “more aggressive in open-source [development]” over the past year based on the gains made by Tongyi Qianwen, according to Alibaba’s Lin Junyang, who is in charge of the model’s open-source buildout, in a WeChat post published on Monday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

“We really feel the power of the open-source community,” Lin said in the post published by Alibaba’s open-source platform ModelScope. “After contributing to the community, the community has also given us a lot of feedback.”

Open source gives public access to a program’s source code, allowing third-party software developers to modify or share its design, fix broken links or scale up its capabilities. Open-source technologies have been a huge contributor to China’s flourishing tech industry over the past few decades.