Alibaba Cloud Opens Access to its AI Model Repository for English Users

Alibaba Cloud has opened the access doors to its AI model repository, ModelScope, for English-language users. The company hopes that with this move, more businesses and developers will leverage its generative AI models.

Launched originally in 2022, the ModelScope repository has been providing access to a variety of Alibaba-powered generative AI models, including its flagship open-source system, Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen).

Alibaba Cloud claims that the platform has amassed more than 5 million users, despite only being limited to users in mainland China. While the platform is similar to Amazon’s Bedrock platform or Hugging Face, its users have only had access to the numerous generative AI models largely trained on the Chinese language and not English.

ModelScope currently contains more than 5,000 models created by Alibaba, as well as other Chinese AI firms, including Baichuan from startup Baichuan Intelligence and the Qingyan chatbot system from Zhipu.

In addition, individual developers can also add their own models to ModelScope, and the platform has a host of tools to help them build models.

In an announcement, Alibaba said, “Developers can also tap a variety of modules on Modelscope to customize their model inference, training, and evaluation with only a few lines of code.”

The English-language launch of ModelScope is the latest open-source release for Alibaba and its cloud division.

The company previously released ModelScopeGPT, a framework for assisting developers attempting to build multimodal AI models. It was accessible through the repository platform of the same name.