Day: July 7, 2023

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Alibaba Cloud Unveils AI Image Generation Model Tongyi Wanxiang to Help Businesses to Unleash Creativity and Productivity

ModelScopeGPT also launched to help users accomplish complex AI tasks

SHANGHAI, CHINA – Media OutReach – 7 July 2023 – Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today unveiled its latest AI image generation model, Tongyi Wanxiang (‘Wanxiang’ means ‘tens of thousands of images’) at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2023. The cutting-edge generative AI model is now available for enterprise customers in China for beta testing.

In addition, the cloud pioneer announced the launch of ModelScopeGPT, a versatile framework designed to assist users in accomplishing complex and specialized AI tasks across language, vision, and speech domains by leveraging various AI models on ModelScope. ModelScope is an open-source Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform introduced by Alibaba Cloud last year, featuring over 900 AI models.

“Tongyi Wanxiang represents another significant milestone in our pursuit of advanced generative AI models as we continue to explore paradigm-shifting technologies that empower businesses and communities to unleash greater creativity and productivity,” said Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

“With the release of Tongyi Wanxiang, high-quality generative AI imagery will become more accessible, facilitating the development of innovative AI art and creative expressions for businesses across a wide range of sectors, including e-commerce, gaming, design and advertising.”

 Introducing Tongyi Wanxiang for Image Generation

The generative AI model is adept at handling various tasks, responding to text prompts in Chinese and English to generate detailed images in an array of styles, encompassing watercolours, oil and Chinese painting to animation, sketch, flat illustration, and 3D cartoons. Moreover, the model can transform any image into a new one with a similar style and stylize images through style transfer, which preserves the content of the original image while applying the visual style of another picture.

Powered by Alibaba Cloud’s trailblazing technologies in knowledge arrangement, visual AI and natural language processing (NLP), the model leverages multilingual materials for enhanced training. It boasts a robust semantic comprehension capability, resulting in more accurate and contextually relevant image generation.

Additionally, by optimizing the high-resolution diffusion process based on the signal-to-noise ratio, the model can strike a balance between composition accuracy and detail sharpness while enhancing its ability to generate high-contrast, visually stunning images with clean backgrounds.

Tongyi Wanxiang was developed using Composer, Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary large model that enables greater control over the final image output, such as spatial layout and palette, while maintaining image synthesis quality and creativity.

Text-to-image generation examples by Tongyi Wanxiang:

Prompt: Immersive, captivating, grayscale coloring, featuring a tiger in the tranquil mandala forest. The image is composed of lines and brushstrokes.

Please refer to the demo video of Tongyi Wanxiang here: https://www.alizila.com/video/wach-how-alibaba-tongyi-wanxiang-creates-generative-ai-image/. Enterprise customers in China can apply for beta testing of Tongyi Wanxiang at: https://wanxiang.aliyun.com/

 ModelScopeGPT Launched for Sophisticated AI Tasks

Alibaba Cloud also unveiled ModelScopeGPT (https://modelscope.cn/studios/damo/ModelScopeGPT/), a powerful framework designed to harnesses the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) available on the platform. ModelScopeGPT will use LLMs as a controller to connect an extensive array of domain-specific expert models in the ModelScope open-source community.  Built within the rich Model-as-a-Service ecosystem, ModelScopeGPT leverages the various AI capabilities offered on Alibaba Cloud. Enterprises and developers can leverage ModelScopeGPT for free to access and execute the best-suited models for performing sophisticated AI tasks based on users’ requests, such as developing multilingual videos.

Alibaba Cloud launched its LLM named Tongyi Qianwen in April, and it plans to integrate the LLM across Alibaba’s various businesses in order to improve the user experience in the near future. The company’s customers and developers will also have access to the model to create customized AI features in a cost-effective way. Since the model’s launch, over 300,000 beta testing requests were received from enterprises from a broad range of sectors, including fintech, electronics, transport, fashion and dairy.

Tongyi Qianwen has also been integrated into Alibaba Cloud’s intelligent assistant, Tingwu, enabling the assistant to comprehend and analyze multimedia content with high levels of accuracy and efficiency. Over 360,000 users have accessed to the AI-powered assistant since its launch. 

AI Hackathon Competition to Inspire Innovation 

ModelScope also hosted its first ever AI Hackathon in China to facilitate the industrial applications of AI models, with cash prize awards and funding opportunities from leading venture capital firms as incentives.

From over 300 participating teams, 56 teams made it to the final round. Participants competed for the grand prize on two tracks. One is to innovate upon a large language model to solve a real-life problem. The second is to leverage existing pretrained models to complete an assigned task, such as text-to-image generation or to build an LLM-powered autonomous agent to utilize the right models for specific tasks.

“By hosting competitions and other community events, we want to engage with more developers and entrepreneurs, and to encourage them to bring their ideas to life, unlock productivity, and create more versatile AI tools that transform and shape the future of our industries,” said Jingren Zhou.

About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, management and application services, big data analytics, a machine learning platform and IoT services. Alibaba maintained its position as the third leading public cloud IaaS service provider globally since 2018, according to IDC. Alibaba is the world’s third leading and Asia Pacific’s leading IaaS provider by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner.

Media Contacts

Crystal Liu

+86 18578497650/+852 60192703

Crystal.liu@alibaba-inc.com

Luica Mak

+44 790 547 1332

Luica@alibaba-inc.com

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Alibaba Cloud Unveils AI Image Generation Model Tongyi Wanxiang  to Help Businesses to Unleash Creativity and Productivity

ModelScopeGPT also launched to help users accomplish complex AI tasks

SHANGHAI, CHINA – Media OutReach – 7 July 2023 – Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today unveiled its latest AI image generation model, Tongyi Wanxiang (‘Wanxiang’ means ‘tens of thousands of images’) at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2023. The cutting-edge generative AI model is now available for enterprise customers in China for beta testing.

In addition, the cloud pioneer announced the launch of ModelScopeGPT, a versatile framework designed to assist users in accomplishing complex and specialized AI tasks across language, vision, and speech domains by leveraging various AI models on ModelScope. ModelScope is an open-source Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform introduced by Alibaba Cloud last year, featuring over 900 AI models.

“Tongyi Wanxiang represents another significant milestone in our pursuit of advanced generative AI models as we continue to explore paradigm-shifting technologies that empower businesses and communities to unleash greater creativity and productivity,” said Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

“With the release of Tongyi Wanxiang, high-quality generative AI imagery will become more accessible, facilitating the development of innovative AI art and creative expressions for businesses across a wide range of sectors, including e-commerce, gaming, design and advertising.”

 Introducing Tongyi Wanxiang for Image Generation

The generative AI model is adept at handling various tasks, responding to text prompts in Chinese and English to generate detailed images in an array of styles, encompassing watercolours, oil and Chinese painting to animation, sketch, flat illustration, and 3D cartoons. Moreover, the model can transform any image into a new one with a similar style and stylize images through style transfer, which preserves the content of the original image while applying the visual style of another picture.

Powered by Alibaba Cloud’s trailblazing technologies in knowledge arrangement, visual AI and natural language processing (NLP), the model leverages multilingual materials for enhanced training. It boasts a robust semantic comprehension capability, resulting in more accurate and contextually relevant image generation.

Additionally, by optimizing the high-resolution diffusion process based on the signal-to-noise ratio, the model can strike a balance between composition accuracy and detail sharpness while enhancing its ability to generate high-contrast, visually stunning images with clean backgrounds.

Tongyi Wanxiang was developed using Composer, Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary large model that enables greater control over the final image output, such as spatial layout and palette, while maintaining image synthesis quality and creativity.

Text-to-image generation examples by Tongyi Wanxiang:  

Prompt: Immersive, captivating, grayscale coloring, featuring a tiger in the tranquil mandala forest. The image is composed of lines and brushstrokes. 

Please refer to the demo video of Tongyi Wanxiang here: https://www.alizila.com/video/wach-how-alibaba-tongyi-wanxiang-creates-generative-ai-image/. Enterprise customers in China can apply for beta testing of Tongyi Wanxiang at: https://wanxiang.aliyun.com/                                                                                                  

ModelScopeGPT Launched for Sophisticated AI Tasks

Alibaba Cloud also unveiled ModelScopeGPT (https://modelscope.cn/studios/damo/ModelScopeGPT/), a powerful framework designed to harnesses the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) available on the platform. ModelScopeGPT will use LLMs as a controller to connect an extensive array of domain-specific expert models in the ModelScope open-source community.  Built within the rich Model-as-a-Service ecosystem, ModelScopeGPT leverages the various AI capabilities offered on Alibaba Cloud. Enterprises and developers can leverage ModelScopeGPT for free to access and execute the best-suited models for performing sophisticated AI tasks based on users’ requests, such as developing multilingual videos. 

Alibaba Cloud launched its LLM named Tongyi Qianwen in April, and it plans to integrate the LLM across Alibaba’s various businesses in order to improve the user experience in the near future. The company’s customers and developers will also have access to the model to create customized AI features in a cost-effective way. Since the model’s launch, over 300,000 beta testing requests were received from enterprises from a broad range of sectors, including fintech, electronics, transport, fashion and dairy.

Tongyi Qianwen has also been integrated into Alibaba Cloud’s intelligent assistant, Tingwu, enabling the assistant to comprehend and analyze multimedia content with high levels of accuracy and efficiency. Over 360,000 users have accessed to the AI-powered assistant since its launch. 

AI Hackathon Competition to Inspire Innovation 

ModelScope also hosted its first ever AI Hackathon in China to facilitate the industrial applications of AI models, with cash prize awards and funding opportunities from leading venture capital firms as incentives.

From over 300 participating teams, 56 teams made it to the final round. Participants competed for the grand prize on two tracks. One is to innovate upon a large language model to solve a real-life problem. The second is to leverage existing pretrained models to complete an assigned task, such as text-to-image generation or to build an LLM-powered autonomous agent to utilize the right models for specific tasks.

“By hosting competitions and other community events, we want to engage with more developers and entrepreneurs, and to encourage them to bring their ideas to life, unlock productivity, and create more versatile AI tools that transform and shape the future of our industries,” said Jingren Zhou.

About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, management and application services, big data analytics, a machine learning platform and IoT services. Alibaba maintained its position as the third leading public cloud IaaS service provider globally since 2018, according to IDC. Alibaba is the world’s third leading and Asia Pacific’s leading IaaS provider by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner.

Media Contacts

Crystal Liu

+86 18578497650/+852 60192703

Crystal.liu@alibaba-inc.com

Luica Mak

+44 790 547 1332

Luica@alibaba-inc.com

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UN to support thousands who fled into South Sudan

The UN Humanitarian Coordinator in South Sudan, Peter Van der Auweraert, has released $8m (£6.3m) from the humanitarian fund to provide life-saving assistance to the 150,000 people in the country who have fled the conflict in Sudan.

The number of arrivals is projected to increase as the crisis continues, the UN’s humanitarian affairs office (Ocha) has said.

Onward transportation of South Sudanese returnees and Sudanese refugees from transit sites remains a significant challenge due to the combination of poor road infrastructure and insecurity in some areas. There are also the additional logistical challenges posed by the onset of the rainy season, Ocha added.

“Many people who fled the conflict in Sudan are arriving across the border with nothing. Many reported that they were subjected to violence and exploitation, such as extortion and looting, as they fled to South Sudan. They need urgent support to reach safety and rebuild their lives,” Mr Van der Auweraert said.

The fighting between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), now in its third month, has displaced nearly three million people, according to estimates by humanitarian agencies.

The largest number of refugees have gone to Chad and Egypt.

Source: BBC

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UK DEFENCE SENIOR ADVISOR VISITS LEBANON, RAISES UK FLAG AT UNIFIL

The British Embassy in Lebanon welcomed the UK Defence Senior Advisor to the Middle East and North Africa (DSAME) Air Marshal Martin Sampson to Lebanon from 5 to 6 July. DSAME met General Joseph Aoun, Chief of Defence for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Foreign Affairs Minister Dr Abdallah Bou Habib. He was accompanied during his visits by Charge D’Affaires Camilla Nickless, and the Defence Attaché Lt. Colonel Lee Saunders. During a special ceremony held at UNIFIL Headquarters in Naqoura, DSAME attended the raising of the United Kingdom’s flag at UNIFIL as a Troop Contributing Country. The UK is represented by a female officer as the Integrated Outreach Operations Officer, and is the 49th troop contributor to the Mission’s now 10,101 peacekeepers. The Charge D’Affaires Camilla Nickless, said: ‘An important milestone in the UK’s contribution to Lebanon’s stability and security during the raising of the United Kingdom’s flag at UNIFIL. We fully support UNIFIL’s work in south Lebanon, as mandated in UN Resolution 1701. The visit of Air Marshal Martin Sampson to Lebanon and his continued close engagement with the LAF Commander is a symbol of our enduring support to the Lebanese Armed Forces.” Air Marshal Martin Sampson said: ‘I was proud to take part in the United Kingdom’s flag raising ceremony at UNIFIL as a troop contributing country. Yesterday’s incident underscored UNIFIL’s critical role in support of stability and security in Lebanon. We urge everyone to exercise restraint and avoid any further escalation. During my meetings I reiterated my support to the Lebanese people and that of the LAF given the current challenging context. We remain a close friend and strong ally of the Lebanese people and the Lebanese Armed Forces.”

Source: National News Agency – Lebanon

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BERRI BROACHES POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS WITH CARETAKER MINISTER MAWLAWI, MP PAKRADOUNIAN

House Speaker, Nabih Berri, on Friday at his Ain al-Tineh residence Caretaker Minister of Interior and Municipalities, Judge Bassam Mawlawi, with whom he reviewed the current general situation, especially the security one, and the latest political developments. Speaker Berri also met with the Secretary General of Tashnag Party, MP Hagop Pakradounian, with whom he discussed the current general situation and legislative affairs. Berri later received former Central Bank Vice Governor Mohammed Baassiri.

Source: National News Agency – Lebanon

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Israeli forces kill Palestinian in occupied Ramallah

Israeli forces shot dead Friday Abdel-Jawad Saleh, 24, in the Um Safa in Ramallah, the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian Health Ministry announced in a statement that the Saleh was shot in the chest, after which he was transferred to the Istishari Hospital in Ramallah before announcing his death. Member of the Um Safa Village Council Muhammad Bahr confirmed that the Israeli soldiers shot the Saleh while he was in the northern parts of tge village.

Source: Jordan News Agency