Alibaba Group Holding Limited's (NASDAQ:BABA) fintech affiliate Ant Group Co is developing large-language model technology to power ChatGPT-style services.
The Jack Ma-backed affiliate's "Zhen Yi" project involves a dedicated unit and will deploy in-house research, Bloomberg reports.
Ant invested nearly 20.5 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) in R&D in 2023, doubling the company's annual spending on such efforts versus 2019.
It is bolstering tech for distributed databases, computer infrastructure, blockchain, privacy computing, and network security.
Ant's move marks its attempts to compete with Alibaba, Baidu Inc (NASDAQ: BIDU), and SenseTime Group Inc (OTC:SNTMF). The efforts mirror Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google and Microsoft Corp's (NASDAQ:MSFT) exploration of generative AI capable of creating original content from poetry to art just with simple user prompts.
Price Action: BABA shares traded lower by 0.69% at $87.32 premarket on the last check Wednesday.
© 2025 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
