Ant Group (蚂蚁集团), a fintech unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba, will unveil its own large language model (LLM) today, its chief executive said at a high-profile summit yesterday in Shanghai.
Eric Jing Xiandong, who is also executive chairman of Ant, revealed at the 2nd Conference on the Bund that the LLM developed by Ant Group, formerly known as Ant Financial, is full-stack and self-developed, without elaborating.
Ant Group, which is still reeling from its failed mega-IPO bid in 2020, has been shifting toward a mode of tech-driven development, instead of relying on payment, credit scoring and internet banking.
Eric Jing, photo courtesy of Ant Group
“Ant sees technology as its most critical competitive edge, the most important source of productivity, and the fundamental driving force of growth,” Jing told the audience. “It places high premium on LLM, and has been pulling out all the stops in this area.”
In addition to LLM, Jing also discussed a broad range of topics from privacy computing to encrypted computing, from the application of blockchain technologies in rental of aerial work platform and battery recycling, to the role of digital RMB in the industrial internet.
Prior to Ant, its parent Alibaba had already joined a number of domestic AI heavyweights and startups to release its own LLM called Qwen (通义千问).
