Alibaba, Zhipu roll out new AI models amid heated open-source race
On Tuesday, Alibaba released Wan2.2, which it claimed was the industry's 'first open-source large video generation models incorporating the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture'. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
MoE is a machine-learning approach that divides an AI model into separate sub-networks, or experts – each focused on a subset of the input data – to jointly perform a task. It enables models to be pre-trained with far less computing power.
The Wan2.2 series features a text-to-video model Wan2.2-T2V-A14B, an image-to-video model Wan2.2-I2V-A14B, and Wan2.2-TI2V-5B, a hybrid model that supports both text-to-video and image-to-video generation tasks.
Zhipu's open-source flagship models have accumulated more than 40 million downloads worldwide since 2020. Photo: Shutterstock Images
Separately, Zhipu, one of China's four 'AI tigers', launched a new generation of its GLM series on Monday. The new models, which include GLM-4.5 with 355 billion parameters and a more streamlined GLM-4.5-Air with 106 billion parameters, were built on a fully self-developed architecture, according to the company.
GLM-4.5 was China's 'most advanced open-source MoE model', as it secured third place globally and first place among both domestic and open-source models based on the average score across '12 representative benchmarks', Zhipu said on Monday.
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