Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has unveiled its AI model for video generation, making it freely accessible and intensifying competition with rivals such as OpenAI. The move is expected to spur adoption and heighten competition in the AI market.
The company has released four versions of wan2.1—T2V1.3B, T2V-14B, I2V-14B-720P, and I2V-14B-480P—all aimed at producing images and videos from image and text inputs.
The ‘14B’ name indicates that the model is fitted with 14 billion parameters, allowing it to handle much more significant input data and produce more accurate results.
These AI models are currently available globally on Alibaba Cloud’s ModelScope and Hugging Face platforms for academic, research, and commercial use. Their global availability will likely trigger widespread use and subsequent innovation in AI-driven image and video creation.
Alibaba initially released the newest version of its video-and image-created AI model back in January, titled ‘Wanx’ but later renamed it to ‘Wan’. Alibaba marketed the model for creating very real-looking visuals and has branded the model as something of a visionary solution within AI-generated content.
Since its release, Wan has been recognized for its superior capabilities, topping Vbench, a highly regarded leaderboard for video generative models. Alibaba has particularly highlighted its model’s excellence in intricate functionalities, like multi-object interaction, distinguishing it from others.
Earlier on Tuesday, Alibaba released a glimpse of its reasoning model, QwQ-Max, aimed at further improving AI to process and evaluate information better.
The firm announced that it plans to make QwQ-Max an open-source model at the time of its complete release, further indicating its dedication to promoting transparency and cooperation in the AI research space.
In addition to this, Alibaba has also developed an aggressive investment plan to ramp up its infrastructural technology capabilities.
The corporation announced plans for a minimum outlay of 380 billion yuan ($52 billion) in three years to add its capabilities. This mega-investment supports Alibaba’s overall long-term ambition to cement leadership in AI advancement and cloud operations and respond to an increasing global appetite for sophisticated levels of computing abilities.