Eddie Wu, chief executive of Alibaba’s cloud unit, said AI had evolved faster in the last 22 months than at “any historical period,” adding, “yet we remain in the early stages of the AGI transformation.” Wu spoke on Thursday at the 2024 Apsara Conference, where Alibaba Cloud, keen to catch up in AI, launched 100 open-sourced Qwen 2.5 multimodal models and a text-to-video AI solution. According to the company’s introduction, Qwen 2.5 is the latest generation of Alibaba’s open-source large language model, which includes seven versions ranging from 500 million to 72 billion parameters, with “an overall performance improvement of more than 18% over its predecessor.” [Alibaba Cloud, in Chinese]