Alibaba, the leader in Chinese e-commerce, announced on Wednesday that its Wan 2.1 artificial intelligence model, which generates images and videos, is now open source, or publicly available. This move is expected to boost adoption of the model and enhance competition in the field of artificial intelligence.
Alibaba’s statement comes after a similar move by DeepSeek, a firm whose supposedly inexpensive open-source models surprised the capital-intensive industry earlier this year and excited tech investors with performance comparable to more established competitors like OpenAI.
Alibaba announced the launch of four Wan 2.1 variations that use text and picture input to create images and videos: T2V-1.3B, T2V-14B, I2V-14B-720P, and I2V-14B-480P. The variation can process more data to produce more precise results because it accepts 14 billion parameters, as indicated by the “14B” designation.
Also Read: Alibaba Reveals Improved AI Model, Says It Beats Competitor DeepSeek-V3
The models are available for academic, research, and commercial use worldwide on Alibaba Cloud’s ModelScope and HuggingFace platforms.
Alibaba, which subsequently shortened its name from Wanx to Wan, unveiled the most recent iteration of its AI model in January, claiming that it could produce incredibly lifelike images and videos.
Since then, the company has emphasized how well-ranked it is on VBench, a scoreboard for video generative models, where it excels in features like multi-object interaction.
Alibaba unveiled the QwQ-Max reasoning model preview on Tuesday; the model will eventually be made open source.
This week, it also revealed intentions to strengthen cloud computing and AI infrastructure by investing at least 380 billion yuan ($52 billion) over the following three years.
Also Read: Alibaba Introduces Qwen 2.5 AI Models, Enhances Generative AI Capabilities
The question of whether AI models will become a commodity is becoming more heated. Some observers wonder whether cutting-edge AI systems will continue to be restricted to tech giants or if they will eventually become broadly accessible like conventional software as more businesses offer open AI tools.
