HONG KONG, Aug 3 Reuters Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group39;s, cloud computing unit released two opensourced artificial intelligence AI models on Thursday in a bid to take on Meta Platform.

The Hangzhoubased company said it has opensourced two large language models LLM, a type of AI model, named Qwen7B and Qwen7BChat on Thursday in a press release.

Each model has 7 billion parameters, which is often used to measure the strength. This marks the first time a big Chinese tech company has opensourced its LLM.

It also comes after Meta unveiled a similar opensourced model named Llama 2 last month, a move that has garnered widespread interest. Some analysts said that opensourced models can chip away the current market dominance enjoyed by OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and Google whose AI models charge users expensive fees.

Alibaba Cloud announced its LLM named Tongyi Qianwen in April which comes with multiple versions featuring different numbers of parameters. Alibaba said Qwen7B and Qwen7BChat are two smallsize versions of the Tongyi Qiawen which aim at helping small and medium businesses to start using AI.

The two models39; code, model weights, and documentation will be freely accessible to academics, researchers and commercial institutions worldwide, the company said.

However, for companies with more than 100 million monthly active users, they will need to seek a licence from Alibaba before using the two models. Similarly, Meta39;s Llama 2 also requires a licence…