Alibaba Cloud has opened up its AI model repository, ModelScope, to English language users, aiming to attract more businesses and developers to utilize its generative AI models.
Originally launched in 2022, ModelScope offers access to a range of Alibaba-developed generative AI models, including the popular Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) system. Initially available only in Mainland China, the platform has already garnered over five million users.
Similar to Amazon's Bedrock platform and Hugging Face, ModelScope features a diverse collection of over 5,000 models primarily trained on Chinese language data, contributed by Alibaba and other Chinese AI firms like Baichuan Intelligence's Baichuan and Zhipu's Qingyan chatbot.
While some models are also available on platforms like Hugging Face, Alibaba Cloud distinguishes itself by offering developers extensive tools, including 1,500 Chinese-language datasets and data processing toolkits, to facilitate AI model creation. Developers can even contribute their own models to the repository.
Alibaba emphasizes the platform's user-friendly capabilities, enabling developers to customize model inference, training, and evaluation with minimal coding.
This English language expansion of ModelScope marks Alibaba Cloud's latest effort in open source AI, following previous releases such as ModelScopeGPT, designed to support developers in building multimodal AI models. The release comes amidst regulatory requirements in China, where models on ModelScope must comply with new internet watchdog rules before public release.
