Alibaba makes AI video generation model free to use globally

The Alibaba office building is seen in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, on Aug 28, 2024. These models will be available via Alibaba Cloud's Model Scope and Hugging Face, a huge repository of AI models. They will be accessible to academics, researchers and commercial institutions globally. The Chinese giant said it is open sourcing four models that are part of its Wan2.1 series, the latest version of the company's foundational AI model that can generate images and video from text and image inputs. Alibaba on Wednesday said that it has made its video generation artificial intelligence models free to use, further ramping up competition with rivals like OpenAI. Open-source AI tech has been thrown into the spotlight since Chinese firm DeepSeek rattled global markets in January, after claiming its artificial intelligence model was trained at a fraction of the cost of leading AI players and on less-advanced Nvidia chips. DeepSeek's model is open source, like Alibaba's, meaning it can be ... Read full article.