AI race: Alibaba, Tencent quickly adopt Meta’s new Llama 3.1 model amid excitement

China’s biggest tech firms moved quickly to adopt the most advanced open-source large language model from the owner of Facebook on their cloud platforms

Reading Time:2 minutes

Facebook owner Meta Platforms has taken a leading position among open-source AI developers with its Llama family of large language models. Photo: Reuters

Published: 6:00pm, 25 Jul 2024

Chinese technology giants Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings have rushed to offer the latest artificial intelligence (AI) model from Facebook owner Meta Platforms into their cloud services, as the debut of Llama 3.1 drew widespread attention this week.

Alibaba Cloud, the e-commerce giant’s online computing platform, was among the first to include the latest open-source Llama family of large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning generative AI products such as ChatGPT – by integrating it into its Bailian model training platform, the company said on Tuesday in a post published to its official WeChat account. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Alibaba said it is offering one month of free compute resources that can be used for training and inferencing tasks with Llama 3.1, which launched on Monday.

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg discusses his company’s powerful new AI model, Llama 3.1, with Bloomberg. Photo: Bloomberg

Shenzhen-based video gaming giant Tencent quickly followed with its own announcement the same day, saying Llama 3.1 is now available on its cloud platform. It includes a number of fine-tuning and inferencing tweaks to ensure Meta’s open source models are usable in a range of areas, from intelligent conversation, text generation and writing tasks, according to the company.

Meta is offering the latest version of Llama in three different sizes – 8B, 70B and 450B – that are named after the billions of parameters they include. The number of parameters generally corresponds with an LLM’s level of sophistication.

In its unveiling, Meta hailed Llama 3.1 as “the first frontier-level open-source AI model”. Early tests have compared it favourably with leading closed-source models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

Widely considered the best-performing open-source LLM family, Llama models have become a default foundation model that many Chinese start-ups use to build their own generative AI products, typically with custom tweaks to change or improve performance.