LLMs are AI models fed with huge amounts of text data for use in a variety of tasks, ranging from natural language processing to machine translation.

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT leverage machine learning algorithms and show strong capabilities in mimicking humanlike responses and assisting people with tasks such as writing essays and scripts, making business proposals and even checking program bugs, which they do within seconds.

A slew of Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Baidu Inc, JD, Tencent Holdings Ltd, and iFlytek Co Ltd have accelerated steps to launch ChatGPT-like products, and bolster the large-scale commercial application of LLMs.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group, recently unveiled its open-source 72 billion-parameter version of its AI-powered LLM, Tongyi Qianwen.

The LLM, called Qwen-72B, achieves a better performance over GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in some authoritative LLM evaluation rankings, with enhanced capabilities in understanding English and Chinese, mathematics reasoning and coding. The company has already open-sourced LLMs with 7 billion parameters and 14 billion parameters.

"Building up an open-source ecosystem is critical to promoting the technological advancement and application of LLMs in China," said Zhou Jingren, CTO of Alibaba Cloud.

The company, Zhou said, will invest in open-source LLM, and aspires to build the most open cloud in the era of AI and make generative AI capabilities accessible to everyone.

Zhou said the open-source LLMs will help enterprises simplify the process of model training and deployment, lower thresholds for the application of LLMs and establish their own customized AI models at a faster pace.

Alibaba Cloud has also released a series of industry-specific models to boost productivity across various industries, such as customer support, legal counseling, healthcare, finance and document management.

Robin Li, co-founder and CEO of Baidu, said: "Generative AI and large language models hold immense transformative power in numerous industries, presenting a significant market opportunity for us. To stay ahead of the game, we keep upgrading our models to generate more creative responses while improving training throughput and lowering inference costs."

The company launched the latest version of its LLM, Ernie 4.0, in October, saying its capabilities are on par with those of OpenAI's most advanced GPT-4 model. The newest version boasts enhanced capacities in understanding, generation, reasoning and memory compared with previous models.

Li said Baidu is committed to building new growth momentum for generative AI and LLMs to drive sustainable long-term development.

He highlighted that the company is working hard to build Ernie-powered applications and solutions for different industries and scenarios, and empower more enterprises to create industry-specific AI models and applications.

Chinese e-commerce giant JD has unveiled its LLM, ChatRhino, which could be used in a wide range of fields, including retail, logistics, finance and health, as the company aims to bolster digital transformation and upgrade various industries by using AI.

Xu Ran, CEO of JD, said the company has accumulated huge amounts of data and knowledge from extensive industrial scenarios, and it will strengthen cooperation with industry partners to promote technological innovation.

Tencent rolled out its foundation LLM, Hunyuan, in September.

The LLM supports a wide array of functions spanning creation of images, copy writing, text recognition, and customer service.

Chinese enterprises can access Hunyuan via Tencent's public cloud platform and fine-tune it to specific needs, the company said.