Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of the Alibaba Group, began its annual Apsara Conference recently by announcing the launch of ModelScope, an open-source Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform that comes with hundreds of AI models, including large pre-trained models for global developers and researchers.
During its flagship conference, the global leading cloud provider also introduced a range of serverless database products and upgraded its integrated data analytics and intelligent computing platform to help customers further achieve business innovation through cloud technologies.
“Cloud computing has given rise to a fundamental revolution in the way computing resources are organized, produced and put to commercial use while shifting the paradigm of software development and speeding up the integration of the cloud and endpoint terminals,” said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, in a press release.
“As more customers are speeding up their cloud adoption, we have been upgrading our cloud-based resources, services and tools to become serverless, more intelligent and digitalized in order to lower the barrier for companies to adopt new technology and capture more opportunities in the cloud era,” he added.
MaaS to create transparent and inclusive technology community
The ModelScope platform was launched with over 300 ready-to-deploy AI models, including large pre-trained models for global developers and researchers developed by Alibaba DAMO Academy (DAMO), Alibaba’s global research initiative, in the past five years.
These models cover various fields from computer vision to natural language processing (NLP) and audio. The platform also includes over 150 state-of-the-art (SOTA) models recognized globally as the best in their respective fields for achieving results in a given task.
Also made available on the platform are Alibaba’s proprietary large pre-trained models such as Tongyi, which is capable of turning text into an image with five billion parameters, and OFA (One-For-All), a six billion-parameter pre-trained model that excels at cross-modal tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering.
To date, independent developers have also contributed dozens of models to the open-source platform.
As an open-source community, ModelScope aims to make developing and running AI models easier and more cost-effective.
Developers and researchers can simply test the models online for free and get the results of their tests within minutes. They can also develop customized AI applications by fine-tuning existing models, and run the models online backed by Alibaba Cloud, or deploy them on other cloud platforms or in a local setting.
The launch underscores DAMO’s ongoing efforts and commitment to promoting a more transparent and inclusive technology by reducing the threshold for building and running AI models, enabling universities and smaller companies to easily use AI for their research and in their business, respectively.
The community is expected to grow further with more quality models available on the platform from DAMO, partners from research institutes and third-party developers in the near future.’The community is expected to grow further with more quality models available on the platform from DAMO, partners from research institutes and third-party developers in the near future.