Alibaba, one of China’s biggest tech companies, announced the release of two new A.I. models on Friday that dramatically level up the possibilities of artificial intelligence.
The open source models, called Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat, are vision language models, meaning they “read” images rather than text, unlike competitors ChatGPT and Google Bard. Qwen-VL-Chat promises complex features like providing directions by scanning street signs, solving math equations based on a photo, and weaving together a narrative based on multiple pictures. For example, it can scan an image of a sign in a hospital written in Mandarin and then translate it into English, or help a news organization write a caption for a photo, the company says.
