Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has revealed its latest endeavor in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) with the launch of an advanced image generator called Tongyi Waxiang. This move comes as Alibaba aims to establish itself as one of the key players in the AI industry, competing against Western counterparts like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.
The rapid rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has served as a wake-up call for Chinese companies deeply invested in AI. In order to ensure China’s ambitions of becoming an AI superpower are not jeopardized, these firms now face the pressure to develop similar or superior AI tools, especially in light of the US attempting to restrict China’s access to advanced technology.
During the World Artificial Intelligence Conference held in Shanghai, Alibaba Cloud introduced Tongyi Waxiang, an AI image generator that can create images through natural-language prompts. The capabilities of this tool are extensive, ranging from watercolors and oil paintings to animation and 3D cartoons. Moreover, it can comprehend prompts in both English and Mandarin.
In contrast to other major AI image generators worldwide, Alibaba’s primary focus for Tongyi Waxiang is on enterprises. According to Zhou Jingren, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, the release of Tongyi Waxiang aims to make high-quality generative AI imagery more accessible. The company envisions this tool being utilized across various industries such as e-commerce, gaming, design, and advertising.
The name Tongyi Waxiang translates to tens of thousands of images in Mandarin, aptly describing its purpose as an image generator. However, its capabilities go beyond image generation. The tool can apply one image’s style to another or generate diverse variations of the same image. Tongyi Waxiang operates on Alibaba’s robust language model called ‘Composer,’ which is a text-to-image diffusion model.
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