Ant Group receives Chinese government nod to roll out AI services

Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, received approval from the Chinese government to roll out products powered by its large language model Bailing to the public.
 

Bailing will be applied to Ant’s various services and help with innovation, Xu Peng, vice president of Ant Group said in a statement on Monday. Chinese tech firms from Alibaba to Tencent Holdings and Baidu have joined startups Baichuan and Zhipu to release ChatGPT-like products, joining a global race to capitalise on the potential of generative AI. Ant, the owner of Alipay, can leverage the popularity of the mobile payment service to gain more data and insight on user habits.
 

The government approval dovetails with efforts at Alibaba. On Monday, the company’s commerce unit also pushed out a suite of tools including chatbots for small businesses trying to expand overseas.
 

Last week, Alibaba Cloud —   which now hosts half of China’s generative AI firms and serves about 80 per cent of China’s technology companies — released Tongyi Qianwen 2.0. It also introduced several sector-focused models at the company’s annual tech conference in Hangzhou.  In September, Ant unveiled two applications powered by its financial large language model.