Alibaba Cloud Offers AI Model Llama to Clients Through Acquisition of Meta: Report

Alibaba’s cloud computing division has announced that it is the inaugural Chinese enterprise to endorse Meta’s open-source artificial intelligence (AI) model, Llama. This endorsement enables Chinese business users of Alibaba to create programs based on the Llama model.

This month, Meta released Llama2, a commercial version of Llama, to offer businesses a powerful free alternative to the expensive proprietary models sold by OpenAI and Google. At the time, Meta said Llama2’s primary partner was Microsoft, but it would be available through other partners as well.

“Alibaba Cloud has today released the first training and deployment solution for the entire Llama2 series in China, and welcomes all developers to create customized large models on Alibaba Cloud,” Alibaba Cloud said in a statement posted on its WeChat account on Tuesday.

A relationship with Meta could provide sticky customers for Alibaba’s cloud business at a time when it faces intensifying competition at home and plans to go public.

The United States has actively sought to restrict Chinese companies’ access to many US-developed AI-related technologies, particularly in the field of AI semiconductors. The Llama2 move would allow Alibaba to advance its own AI ambitions by keeping abreast of the latest developments in the technology.

For Metal, whose Facebook social media platform has been banned in China for years along with other Western platforms, it could strengthen ties with the world’s second largest economy.

Meta’s spokesperson refused to comment. Alibaba Cloud did not respond to a request for comment.

China has sought to catch up with the United States in the field of artificial intelligence, with Beijing encouraging Chinese companies to rapidly develop domestic and “manageable” artificial intelligence models that can compete with those developed by US companies. Alibaba and peers such as Tencent Holdings have been aggressively developing their own AI models in recent months.

Like the models that power popular chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, Llama2 is a large machine learning model trained on massive amounts of data to generate consistent and natural-sounding output.

According to Meta, Llama2 will be free for companies with less than 700 million monthly active users. Programs with more users must apply for a license from Meta.

Alibaba also added that if a customer wants to use Llama2 to provide services to the Chinese public, it must comply with Chinese laws and avoid practices and content that may harm the country.