What Happened: Despite the launch, Alibaba’s shares dropped 2.45% to 131.50 HKD ($16.92) on the Hong Kong Exchange.

The new open-source R1-Omni model, developed by Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab, can infer emotional states from video while describing people’s clothing and environment, reported Bloomberg.

Alibaba’s R1-Omni is available for free on Hugging Face, unlike OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, which costs $200 per month.

See Also: Ray Dalio Warns US Debt Crisis Could Trigger ‘Shocking Developments' Calls To Reduce Deficit At 3% Of GDP

Why It Matters: Alibaba has committed $53 billion toward cloud and AI infrastructure over the next three years. The company recently launched QwQ-32B, a reasoning model claiming performance comparable to DeepSeek’s R1 despite having fewer parameters.

Alibaba.com president Zhang Kuo aims for 100% AI tool adoption among the platform’s 200,000 merchants by the end of 2025, with over half currently using these tools weekly.

Analyst consensus gives Alibaba a price target of $138.26, with recent ratings from Benchmark, Bernstein, and Morgan Stanley averaging $178.33, suggesting a potential 32.39% upside.

Read Next:

• Palantir Calls For ‘Software-First Approach' As Pentagon Spends Under 1% On Modern Warfare

Image Via Shutterstock