Alibaba is among China's leaders, and in 2023, not long after ChatGPT made a splash, the company launched its first AI model called Tongyi Qianwen, or Qwen. The Hangzhou-headquartered company has since aggressively launched numerous models that allow tasks such as video, text and image generation from user prompts.
Alibaba has made its models open source, meaning anyone can download them and build upon them. This has been key to its success. Some of the most popular models on Hugging Face, a global repository of AI models, are built on Qwen.