Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has been named an Emerging Leader in all four quadrants evaluated in the latest Gartner® “Innovation Guide for Generative AI Technologies” report, issued last month.
According to Gartner: “The Emerging Market Quadrant is a pilot initiated in June 2024 to provide a visualization of generative AI vendors. It provides a way to represent the vendors’ capabilities in a dynamic and fast-moving market.” Alibaba Cloud recognized as an Emerging Leader in all four quadrants of the report: GenAI Specialized Cloud Infrastructure, GenAI Model Provider, GenAI Engineering, and AI Knowledge Management Apps/General Productivity.
EMQ evaluates vendors based on two dimensions – Future Potential (x-axis) and Features (y-axis). According to Gartner: “the Future Potential axis looks at multiple factors that demonstrate a vendor’s understanding of both the overall market and the submarkets, the features they are developing and offering to meet those emerging market needs, and their strategy to keep pace in an emerging and fluid market space”; and for Features (y-axis), it “focuses on a vendor’s offering in the submarket, specifically the features and quality thereof. We consider the vendor’s viability as a GenAI provider, as well as frameworks and tool compatibility.”
Cloud + AI to Accelerate AI Growth
Alibaba Cloud is at the forefront of a new era of AI-driven innovation with its “Cloud+AI” strategy. Pioneering the concept of “Model as a Service” (MaaS), Alibaba Cloud has set an industry standard that is quickly becoming the norm across the sector. During its annual flagship event, Apsara Conference 2024, Alibaba Cloud unveiled a slew of innovative updates in AI infrastructure, covering everything from green data center architecture, data management, to model training and inferencing. These advancements empower businesses across industries with a wide array of AI capabilities spanning infrastructure, AI models, and AI development platforms.
A major highlight of Alibaba Cloud’s AI portfolio is the Qwen model series, a proprietary family of large language model introduced in April 2023. The latest iteration of the portfolio, Qwen2.5, enhances the model’s knowledge and stronger capabilities in math and coding, while supporting over 29 languages. These models are tailored to power a wide array of AI applications, across various sectors from automobile, gaming to science research, both at the edge or in the cloud.
Since their release, the Qwen models have gained significant traction with over 40 million downloads across platforms such as Hugging Face and ModelScope, Alibaba’s open-source initiative. Furthermore, these models have inspired the creation of over 78,000 models on Hugging Face, further expanding the AI ecosystem.
Empowering Enterprises and Developers with Model Studio
To better enable enterprises and developers to create AI models and applications, Alibaba Cloud launched Model Studio, a premier GenAI development platform. Model Studio gives customers access to a wide range of Qwen models, offering both closed-source and open-source versions featuring multimodal capabilities. With model sizes that range from 0.5 billion to several hundred billion parameters, Model Studio facilitates the development of customised GenAI applications that meet the unique needs of various industries and scenarios.
Industries across the board have already been adopting Qwen, including companies from gaming, automobile, retail and smartphone sectors. As of September 2024, over 300,000 customers had engaged with Qwen through Model Studio, demonstrating the platform’s broad appeal and its potential to revolutionize AI applications across industries.
