Alibaba research unit Damo Academy has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) tailored for southeast Asian languages, as Chinese tech giants continue to push forward with the technology amidst US sanctions.
Damo said on Monday the LLM was trained on Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, Malay, Khmer, Lao, Tagalog, and Burmese data sets and has outperformed competitors in linguistic and safety tasks.
The AI is Alibaba’s first region-specific LLM and is aimed at a rapidly growing market that is also being targeted by ByteDance-owned TikTok and AI chip giant Nvidia amongst others.
Alibaba’s Southeast Asia e-commerce platform Lazada is targeting a turnover of around $100 billion (£79bn) with 300 million consumers in the region by 2030.
The LLM includes a chat assistant called SeaLLM Chat that is designed to help businesses using the model to engage with Southeast Asia markets.
Damo said the SeaLLM performs better than other tools such as ChatGPT in non-Latin language tasks and has the ability to interpret and process text up to 9 times longer than competitors for non-Latin languages.
It said SeaLLM also delivered better results in translating between English and languages such as Lao and Khmer, which have limited data for training AIs.
Bing Lidong, director of Damo’s language technology lab, said the LLM could “embrace the richness of Southeast Asia” and that innovation would empower communities historically under-represented in the digital world.
The move comes amidst an explosion of AI research in China, with 130 LLMs released by Chinese companies and research institutes as of July this year, following a boom in the sector sparked by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Chinese chip designers including Huawei and Tencent are also redoubling their efforts to develop AI chips and market them domestically as alternatives to those from Nvidia, many of which have been banned under increasingly strict US export controls.
Elon Musk dismisses two senior Tesla executives, plus the entire division that runs Tesla's Supercharger…
Eight newspaper publishers in the US allege Microsoft and OpenAI used their millions of their…
US judge sentences Binance founder, Changpeng Zhao, to four months in prison for ignoring money…
Rights group argues ChatGPT tendency to generate false information on individuals violates GDPR data protection…
European Commission says Apple's iPadOS is 'gatekeeper' due to large number of businesses 'locked in'…
As the cloud continues to be an essential asset for all businesses, developing and maintaining…