Alibaba's cloud computing unit has released two open-source AI models, Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat, marking the first time a major Chinese tech company has open-sourced its large language models. Aimed at helping small and medium-sized enterprises leverage AI, the models' code, weights, and documentation will be freely available to the global research community and commercial institutions. However, companies with more than 100 million monthly active users will need a license from Alibaba to use the models.

Alibaba launched its closed-source GPT-4 competitor Tongyi Qianwen in April and its DALL-E and Midjourney competitor Tongyi Wanxiang in July.