As China's AI race heats up, Alibaba and Huawei reveal new products, including an image generator

As Chinese firms compete for position in the global AI race, Alibaba Group Holdings and Huawei Technologies unveiled new products on Friday, including an artificial intelligence (AI) picture generator and an AI model improvement.

Alibaba Cloud, an Alibaba subsidiary, unveiled an image generator called Tongyi Wanxiang at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, which will first be offered to corporate clients in beta form.

Huawei also unveiled the third edition of its Panggu AI model on Friday, at the commencement of its three-day annual developer conference in Dongguan.

Following the ChatGPT chatbot by OpenAI, which sparked a generative AI boom, Chinese tech companies are rapidly creating AI solutions. According to McKinsey, generative AI might potentially add $7.3 trillion (approximately Rs. 82,597 crore) to the global economy per year.

Alibaba's picture generator will compete with OpenAI's DALL-E and Midjourney's Midjourney, both of which are located in the United States and have a big global following.

Alibaba Cloud is the result of a big makeover launched in March, which divided the Chinese tech giant into six sections. Tongyi Qianwen, a ChatGPT-like text generator, was released in April.

In addition to the Tongyi Wanxiang image generator, which translates approximately as "truth from tens of thousands of pictures" and was announced on Friday, Alibaba Cloud has also released ModelScopeGPT, an AI tool for developers.

According to Huawei, their AI takes a different approach than many other AI applications. Rather than focusing on content creation, it stated that its Pangu 3.0 model will primarily serve industrial applications.

The Shenzhen-based business stated that their model intends to deliver more effective freight railway carriage safety checks, AI help for local government functions and more accurate weather forecast.