Alibaba Cloud (NYSE:BABA)launched Thursday its latest artificial intelligence model in its “Qwen series,” as large language model competition in China continues to heat up following the “DeepSeek moment.”
The new “Qwen2.5-Omni-7B” is a multimodal model, which means it can process inputs, including text, images, audio and videos, while generating real-time text and natural speech responses, according to an announcement on Alibaba Cloud’s website.
The company says that the model can be deployed on edge devices like mobile phones, offering high efficiency without compromising performance.
“This unique combination makes it the perfect foundation for developing agile, cost-effective AI agents that deliver tangible value, especially intelligent voice applications,” Alibaba said.
For example, it could be used to help a visually impaired person navigate their environment through real-time audio description, the company added.
The new model is open-sourced on the platforms Hugging Face and Github, following a growing trend in China after DeepSeek made its breakthrough R1 model open-source.
Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution. Over the past years, Alibaba Cloud says it has open-sourced over 200 generative AI models.
BABA shares opened Thursday up $3.79, or 2.9%, to $136.04.
