Alibaba Turns Up The Heat On AI With New Image-Video Generation Tools To Take On Google, OpenAI

Alibaba (BABA) is making a big push in artificial intelligence-powered video and image-generation tools, taking the fight against Google and OpenAI to the next level and sparking buzz among Alibaba watchers on Stocktwits.

The Chinese tech industry has pushed the pedal on AI, with Alibaba's Qwen models and Baidu's Ernie bot, in a substantial way this year. That led to an impressive surge in Chinese tech stocks before U.S. tariffs put the brakes.

Retail investors were taking notice. On Stocktwits, Alibaba was the number 2 trending ticker, and the sentiment for the stock shifted to 'neutral' from 'bearish.' BABA shares are up 35.7% year-to-date.

Alibaba unveiled its new multimodal AI model, Qwen VLo, on Friday, designed to generate and edit high-quality visuals from text and image prompts. According to the company, the model is capable of creating complex scenes step-by-step, making quick edits, and generating images in multiple languages.

Qwen VLo will directly compete with tools like ChatGPT-4o, DALL-E, Midjourney, and Imagen (Note: some of these tools are not available in China). That was followed by another video-focused model, Wan2.1-VAC, earlier this week. The open-source model is billed as efficient for advanced video creation and editing with low effort.

Alibaba is accelerating its AI and cloud push, announcing plans in February to invest over 380 billion yuan (about $52 billion) in AI infrastructure over the next three years. 

On Wednesday, the company said it will open new data centers in Malaysia and the Philippines, and launch a global AI competency center in Singapore, aimed at helping 5,000 businesses and training 100,000 developers to adopt AI across various industries.

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