Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Chinese tech heavyweight Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, has unveiled the latest version of its large language model, Tongyi Qianwen 2.5, saying its capabilities have surpassed those of US company OpenAI's most advanced GPT-4 Turbo model.

The newly released Tongyi Qianwen 2.5 achieves a full upgrade with improved performance in reasoning, code comprehension and textual understanding compared with the previous version, the company said.

In the context of Chinese language, the new model has caught up with GPT-4 in terms of text understanding and generation, knowledge quiz, dialogues, and life advice, said Zhou Jingren, chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud's large language models have been deployed by over 90,000 enterprise users in a wide range of industries including consumer electronics, automobiles, education, healthcare, culture, and tourism and gaming.

"We look forward to collaborating with our customers and developers in seizing the immense growth opportunities presented by the latest surge in generative artificial intelligence technology," Zhou said.

Zhou added they will continue to contribute a diverse array of AI models to the open-source communities.

Alibaba Cloud has rolled out its newest open-source 110 billion-parameter version of Tongyi Qianwen, called Qwen1.5-110B. Currently, the open-source Qwen series have seen over 7 million downloads.

The company released Tongyi Qianwen in April 2023 after OpenAI's ChatGPT took the world by storm following its launch in November 2022. LLMs refer to AI models fed with huge amounts of text data for use in a variety of tasks, ranging from natural language processing to machine translation.