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Alibaba Cloud said on Wednesday that it had seen over 200,000 beta testing requests for its generative AI model from enterprise customers since its launch, a solid debut across a wide range of industrial sectors.

The Hangzhou-headquartered company will work with partners across various industries to build customized AI models for industry-specific applications based on the large language model launched earlier this month, dubbed Tongyi Qianwen, it said at its annual partnership summit in Nanjing.

“Together with our industrial partners, we can deliver more tangible value to enterprise customers to suit their specific business needs,” said Daniel Zhang, Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

Requests for beta testing the AI model came from a broad range of sectors, including fintech, electronics, transport, fashion and dairy, according to Alibaba Cloud.

Seven companies, including IT solution provider Kunlun Digital Technology and CICC Wealth Management, joined Alibaba Cloud as the first batch of partners to build customized AI models for industries. As part of the partnership program, Alibaba Cloud will provide cloud computing support and AI products and services to help companies finetune the large language model.

Enterprise customers and developers can access the customized AI models through websites and APIs to build applications for their enterprise-specific tasks.

“In the face of the huge opportunities brought by intelligent transformation, only when we grow together can we have lasting cooperation with our partners,” said Zhang at the summit.

Price Cut

Also on Wednesday, Alibaba Cloud said it would cut the price of its core products and services in China by 15% to 50%, its biggest fee cut in history.

The price cut is to bring the benefits of shifting to the cloud to its partners, cut the cost of cloud use to further expand public cloud use in China, it said at the summit.

Earlier this month, Alibaba Cloud revealed its plan to integrate the large language model Tongyi Qianwen into applications across Alibaba’s ecosystem.

It revealed last week that users will be able to access over 10 AI-powered functions on Alibaba’s enterprise communication platform DingTalk, as part of the integration. A custom chatbot can handle requests for users, from creating to-do lists, generating chat summaries, to drafting campaign posts.

Users can also train their chatbots by feeding them materials and having the bots learn on their own.

Also from last week, Alibaba’s auto-operating system AliOS started to integrate the AI model into the system for internal testing. The move can help enhance programming efficiency with AI-generated coding and allows users to build customized applications in the operating system.

Alibaba-backed premium electric vehicle company IM Motors will be the first auto brand to pilot the AI-powered operating system, according to a release from Alibaba Cloud.

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