Alibaba And Tencent Lap Up Meta's AI Large Language Model

Alibaba Group Holding BABA and Tencent Holdings have quickly integrated Meta Platforms Inc’s META latest artificial intelligence (AI) model Llama 3.1 into their cloud services.

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), SCMP reports.

This technology underpins generative AI products like ChatGPT.

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Alibaba announced the integration on Tuesday, offering one month of free computing resources for training and inferencing tasks with Llama 3.1.

Tencent soon followed with its announcement on the same day. Llama 3.1 is now available on Tencent’s cloud platform, featuring fine-tuning and inferencing tweaks to ensure the models’ usability in intelligent conversation, text generation, and writing tasks.

Meta has positioned Llama 3.1 as a powerful alternative to leading closed-source models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.

U.S.-China geopolitical relations became strained following the Western counterpart’s advanced semiconductor sanctions on the Asian counterpart, which included limiting AI chip access from the likes of Nvidia Corp NVDA and peers.

A prior report quoted Alibaba co-founder and chairman Joe Tsai acknowledging China’s lagging position in the AI development race, with Washington’s embargo taking a toll on their AI ambitions. 

Alibaba stock has lost over 22% in the last 12 months as it strives to accomplish its AI ambitions amid a weak domestic economy crippled with intense rivalry.

Price Action: BABA shares closed lower by 0.25% at $75.21 premarket at the last check on Friday.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

Photo by Fooksou Lamimo via Wikimedia Commons