Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) is drawing renewed investor attention as momentum builds across its artificial intelligence ecosystem.
Qwen Models Hit Global Adoption Milestone
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group, has seen its flagship Qwen family of artificial intelligence models surpass 700 million downloads on the developer platform Hugging Face as of January.
Research published Friday by consultancy AIBase, citing Hugging Face data, showed that Qwen’s estimated downloads in December alone exceeded the combined total of the following eight most popular models on the platform.
Those rivals include offerings from Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META), OpenAI, and Chinese peers like Zhipu AI, SCMP reported on Monday.
“Tens of thousands of real-world applications around the globe have been built based on Qwen, marking a historic peak for [Chinese] open-source large models within the international developer community,” the AIBase report said.
Alibaba Cloud has driven Qwen’s adoption by open-sourcing models across a wide range of sizes, from versions with about 600 million parameters to models with tens of billions of parameters.
That strategy allows developers to select models that match their performance needs, helping broaden Qwen’s appeal and use cases.
Consumer AI Push Strengthens Ecosystem
Alibaba and its affiliates have also embedded Qwen models into consumer products, including the Qwen AI assistant, the Quark AI assistant app, and Ant Group’s health app A-Fu.
To accelerate its consumer-facing AI efforts, Alibaba recently formed the Qwen Consumer Business Group, led by Vice President Wu Jia.
Alibaba stock gained over 87% in the last 12 months, driven by momentum in its AI and cloud computing businesses.
Chip Access Hopes Lift Investor Sentiment
Alibaba shares rose after reports suggested China may soon allow limited imports of Nvidia Corp.’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) H200 artificial intelligence chips. The stock jumped more than 5% on Thursday before paring gains early Friday, as investors weighed signals that Beijing could approve select imports as soon as this quarter.
BABA Price Action: Alibaba shares were up 4.41% at $157.61 during premarket trading on Monday, according to Benzinga Pro data.
Photo by VTT Studio via Shutterstock
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