The Alibaba Group’s annual Apsara Conference was marked by yet another innovation developed by Alibaba Cloud, the company’s digital technology and intelligence team.
Called ModelScope, the new platform is an open-source Model as a Service (MaaS) solution that will be offered to global developers and researchers. ModelScape comes equipped with 300 AI models, including several large pre-trained ones specifically developed for use in research.
Alibaba Cloud Intelligence president Jeff Zhang says that, because recent advancements in cloud computing have revolutionized the way computing resources are made, organized, and implemented, the company has been actively upgrading its cloud-centric resources, services, and tools in order to drop the barriers and enable other firms to adopt newer technologies from the cloud. ModelScope is one such resource specifically created to maximize the potential of the cloud.
What Exactly is ModelScope?
Developed by the Alibaba DAMO Academy, the company’s global research arm, over a five-year period, ModelScope covers numerous fields of application, including computer vision, natural language processing, and audio. Among the models pre-installed on the platform are 150 state-of-the-art models representing the best in various fields for achieving specific results within certain parameters.
The platform also includes a number of proprietary pre-trained models, including Alibaba’s Tongyi which is used to transform the text into visual images with five billion parameters, as well as One for All (OFA), a six-billion-parameter model specifically created for cross-modal tasks.
In the long run, ModelScope’s developers hope the platform will make the development and implementation of AI models far easier than they are now, as well as more cost-effective. Those involved in research may freely test the models online and get the results of such tests in a few minutes. The platform may also be used for the creation of custom AI applications by tweaking existing models, running models backed online, or deploying them on other platforms.
With the introduction of ModelScope, Alibaba Cloud is making good on its promise to help customers focus on product development and deployment through its proprietary line of serverless cloud products. These innovative solutions are meant to transform computing power into on-demand capabilities for users in a wide range of sectors.
By leveraging these server-free technologies, Alibaba Cloud customers enjoy the benefits of automatic scaling, extreme flexibility based on actual workloads, as well as a more cost-efficient pay-as-you-go billing model. At present, the company has over 20 serverless products and is working to expand the measure into other product categories in the near future.
