Latest news with #TongyiLab
South China Morning Post
5 days ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Alibaba's world-leading AI lab becomes a target for talent poaching by Chinese rivals
Top artificial intelligence talent at Alibaba Group Holding 's Tongyi Lab, developer of the widely used open-source Qwen models, has become highly sought after, with a number of leading experts leaving to join rival tech giants amid a heated recruitment race. Recent departures include Yan Zhijie and Bo Liefeng, two senior figures at Tongyi. Yan, who joined Alibaba in 2015, was an early member of the company's cutting-edge Damo Academy and later led Tongyi's speech lab. He left Alibaba in February and recently joined 's Explore Academy, a research division founded in 2020 to focus on frontier technology, Chinese media reported. did not directly comment on Yan's recruitment, but said on Monday that 'Explore Academy is proceeding as planned, actively recruiting top AI talent from across the industry, including technical experts and members of our Tech Genius Team'. Following his departure from Alibaba, Yan briefly joined Tencent Holdings , but left soon after an internal restructuring, according to Chinese media reports. Li Xiangang, co-founder of start-up took his place In June. Tencent's booth at World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July. Photo: Wency Chen Separately, Bo, who headed Tongyi's applied vision division after previous roles at and recently transitioned to Tencent's Hunyuan AI model team, Chinese media reported.
South China Morning Post
18-06-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Alibaba recruits top Chinese AI scientist Li Xiangang to lead speech-recognition push
Li Xiangang, a leading Chinese scientist in speech recognition, has joined Alibaba Group Holding to spearhead its artificial intelligence (AI) voice team, boosting the tech giant's capabilities in the burgeoning field. Sources familiar with the matter said Li, who holds a PhD in Computer and Information Sciences from Peking University, had taken on a role leading speech AI research at the Hangzhou-based e-commerce giant. He fills a position previously held by Yan Zhijie, who left the company. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. The speech team, part of Alibaba's Tongyi Lab, focuses on multimodal speech and language models. In July 2024, the lab open-sourced two foundational speech models, SenseVoice and CosyVoice. SenseVoice's multilingual speech recognition notably outperformed OpenAI's Whisper by 50 per cent in Chinese and Cantonese, according to Alibaba. Li's move was first reported by Chinese media outlets. Machine-learning models for speech and recognition have broad AI applications, including in chatbots and digital avatars. Photo: Shutterstock Images Machine-learning models for speech and recognition have broad AI applications, including in chatbots and digital avatars. This has led to intense competition among China's Big Tech firms wanting to stake out their positions in the sector. Chinese search giant Baidu, for example, showcased a digital avatar of Luo Yonghao, a prominent Chinese public speaker and entrepreneur, during its AI Day on Tuesday.
South China Morning Post
21-02-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Alibaba Cloud AI model Animate Anyone 2 simplifies lifelike character animation
Published: 10:00am, 21 Feb 2025 Alibaba Group Holding 's cloud computing arm has introduced its updated artificial intelligence (AI) model, Animate Anyone 2, which the company touts as simplifying the animation of lifelike characters with just a static image and one video cue. Unlike previous character-animation methods that solely use motion signals, Animate Anyone 2 achieves high-fidelity character image animation by processing both motion and environmental signals from reference content, such as source videos, to generate new clips, according to a technical study published last week by Tongyi Lab , the large language model (LLM) research and development unit of Alibaba Cloud , via arXiv – an open-access repository of academic papers. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. 'We extract environmental information from [source] videos, enabling the animated character to preserve its original environment … facilitating seamless character-environment integration,' the study said. Animate Anyone 2 was built on top of the model's first iteration that was announced in late 2023, focused on generating character videos from still images. Alibaba Cloud's Animate Anyone 2 enables an image of Hong Kong filmmaker Stephen Chow Sing-chi to seamlessly replace Mr Bean, portrayed by British actor Rowan Atkinson, riding a bicycle in a video clip. Photo: SCMP ChatGPT creator OpenAI , subsequently, set the AI industry ablaze with its introduction of text-to-video model Sora in February last year, which triggered a race among Chinese Big Tech companies and start-ups to release similar products.
