Alibaba Opens AI Model Platform to International UsersAlibaba Opens AI Model Platform to International Users

Alibaba Cloud has widened access to its AI model repository ModelScope to English language users, in the hopes more businesses and developers will leverage its generative AI models.

The ModelScope repository was originally launched in 2022, providing access to a variety of Alibaba-made generative AI models, including its flagship open source system Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen).

Despite being previously limited to users in Mainland China, Alibaba Cloud claims the platform amassed more than five million users.

ModelScope is similar to Amazon’s Bedrock platform or Hugging Face, only users have access to a variety of generative AI models trained largely on the Chinese language instead of English.

The platform currently contains more than 5,000 models created by Alibaba, as well as other Chinese AI firms, including Baichuan from startup Baichuan Intelligence and the Qingyan chatbot system from Zhipu.

Some of the models are available on other platforms, like Hugging Face, however, Alibaba Cloud is trying to tempt developers with a host of tools to help them build AI models, including some 1,500 Chinese-language datasets and data processing toolkits.

Individual developers can also add their own models to ModelScope.

In addition to models, Alibaba’s ModelScope host of tools to help them build models, 

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“Developers can also tap a variety of modules on Modelscope to customize their model inference, training and evaluation with only a few lines of code,” Alibaba said in an announcement.

The English language launch of ModelScope is the latest open source release for Alibaba and its cloud division.

The company previously released ModelScopeGPT, a framework for assisting developers attempting to build multimodal AI models, which was accessible through the repository platform of the same name.
The Chinese models on ModelScope would have had to be checked by the country’s internet watchdog, following new rules requiring models to be approved before public release.