Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced a series of innovative AI products and services at the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Global Summit.
The comprehensive set of new products is designed to meet the burgeoning demand for Generative AI development from customers worldwide.
The extensive AI solutions from Alibaba Cloud, spanning from AI computing platforms to AI acceleration services and AI-centric applications, are designed to assist customers in creating their own Generative AI applications in a more efficient, security-focused, and cost-effective manner.
Selina Yuan, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, said: “To cater for the thriving demand for generative AI, we are constantly introducing innovative products and services to tackle different pain points of our global customers. Our comprehensive AI services are designed to help customers seize the unparalleled opportunities offered by this unstoppable technology trend.”
“As part of our commitment to foster more inclusive and innovative application development for generative AI, we have been joining forces with industry leaders to further extend our capabilities for different scenarios, ” added Yuan.
Comprehensive AI services for generative AI development
To reduce AI process complexity, Alibaba Cloud introduced PAI-Lingjun Intelligent Computing Service, a comprehensive AI computing platform for high-performance computing tasks, such as foundation model training and inference.
It offers large-scale deep learning and intelligent computing capabilities on Alibaba Cloud. The service also provides full-process AI engineering capabilities, including AI development, AI training, AI role management, and computing resource management.
The platform, already in use in Mainland China, will be available in Singapore from early 2024, followed by more general availability across Asia throughout the year.
To accelerate AI model training and inference, Alibaba Cloud launched Alibaba Cloud AI Acceleration Solution, which uses leading datasets and hardware accelerators to manage data-intensive applications, optimising the utilisation of computing instances to expedite AI model training and inference tasks.
According to the Stanford DAWN Deep Learning Benchmark, it can speed up AI model training by 70% and inference by up to three times. The solution includes layers for cloud-native AI suite, AI job scheduling, AI data acceleration, AI computing acceleration engine, resource scheduling, and computing resources, with each layer offering specific acceleration solutions for different scenarios.
To simplify building an AI-based search service, Alibaba Cloud unveiled OpenSearch LLM-Based Conversational Search, its proprietary large-scale distributed search engine that enables intelligent search services in e-commerce, multimedia, social media, and big data queries in enterprises.
Empowered by large language models, the service allows enterprises to rapidly build a dedicated conversational search system, ensuring security, accuracy, and reliability in search results. It also supports multimodal search results such as answers, URLs, and images to cater to specific business search requirements.
Technology partnership to foster innovative application development
Alibaba Cloud announced a series of partnerships with global technology leaders to offer customers more advanced and security-focused cloud services, accelerating their digital transformation journey:
- To promote innovative application development for enterprises, Alibaba Cloud collaborates with Red Hat to make Red Hat OpenShift, a platform for building, deploying and managing applications at scale, deployable on Alibaba Cloud.
- Red Hat OpenShift on Alibaba Cloud combines the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes with Alibaba Cloud’s robust hybrid infrastructure. Optimised with full-stack automated operations, it offers a more consistent experience across environments to help customers boost productivity more effectively.
Accelerate digital transformation for global customers
Alibaba Cloud also announced collaborations with enterprise customers in markets including Malaysia, South Korea, United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates, underscoring its unwavering commitment to its over 4 million global customers in exploring new opportunities presented by digital transformation and new AI trends.
