Alibaba Partners with 01.AI to Enhance AI Solutions for Businesses

Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing division is partnering with the Chinese start-up 01.AI to create advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models. This collaboration signals a trend of consolidation within the rapidly expanding AI market in China.

On Thursday, Alibaba Cloud announced the agreement with 01.AI, a Beijing-based tech start-up led by Lee Kai-fu, the former head of Google China. This partnership will establish an "industrial large model laboratory" where the expertise and resources of both teams will be combined.

The primary goal of this lab is to engage in research and development activities focused on AI technologies and services. Together, they aim to produce "robust and comprehensive large model solutions" tailored for business clients, as stated by Alibaba Cloud.

01.AI, which was founded in May 2023, has quickly reached a significant milestone—becoming a unicorn—within just six months following a funding round that included support from Alibaba Cloud. The start-up’s open-source foundational large language model (LLM), named Yi-34B, was once recognized as the top pre-trained model by the online AI community Hugging Face, although it has since lost position.

As for competition, 01.AI’s premier model, Yi-1.5-9B-Chat-16K, has recently ranked 10th among its Chinese counterparts according to the benchmarking platform SuperClue. In contrast, Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct model has taken the lead, ranking just below foreign competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Alibaba, AI, business