Alibaba To Enter The Chatbot Arena

A week after Alibaba Group Holdings Limited BABA announced it will restructure into six standalone divisions, Bloomberg reported the Chinese tech giant is seeking companies to test its Tongyi Qianwen AI chatbot.

Cloud computing unit is sending invitations

Bloomberg reported that Alibaba’s cloud computing unit is sending invitation codes to selected corporate customers for them to try out its language model, according to an announcement posted on the subsidiary’s official WeChat account. 

The chatbot's name is partly derived from the ancient philosopher Mencius and can be translated as “Truth from a Thousand Questions.” Considering that Alibaba Cloud’s website for the service is only in Chinese, it is possible that it will be used to primarily to process queries in the company’s home language.

Upon the news of the Chinese tech giant launching its own AI tool, shares rose as much as 2.5% in Hong Kong on Thursday, with the stock market being closed on Friday due to a holiday.

Standalone divisions with their own boards and CEOs

The six independently run companies that could seek separate IPOs will be divided into cloud computing, Chinese e-commerce, global e-commerce, digital mapping and food delivery, logistics, and media and entertainment. This move will effectively dismantle a business empire built over two decades by entrepreneur Jack Ma. Moreover, the announcement came shortly after its co-founder reappeared in China after spending months overseas and keeping a low profile. 

The restructuring of one of China’s largest private-sector companies who is now worth of a quarter of its highest value of $800 billion comes after the authorities in China decided to tame the tech sector. 

Chatbot unveiling

The formal launch of the chatbot that will be facing off Microsoft Corporation MSFT’s ChatGPT is expected to take place on Tuesday’s event in Beijing as Alibaba Cloud will be hosting a technology summit.

Other players are also entering the AI chatbot race

Baidu Inc BIDU will be joining the AI chatbot arena with its Ernie Bot application that is currently open only to trial users. On Saturday, Huawei Technologies will be revealing its natural language processing AI model.  

It seems that the AI chatbot arena will soon become like Alibaba’s core e-commerce business that has been filled with intense competitions such as JD.com Inc JD  and PDD Holdings Inc.’s PDD Pinduoduo who did a great job in snapping Alibaba’s market share. Despite the company’s efforts to better engage with customers, Alibaba has been facing challenges the Chinese version of TikTok, ByteDance Ltd.’s Douyin with Alibaba’s revenue growth in the past two quarters performing below the overall growth in China’s e-commerce sales of physical goods.

The group’s current CEO, Mr. Daniel Zhang, will continue to lead the cloud-computing division, as all six divisions of the Alibaba empire gear up to grow globally and in the artificial-intelligence arena.