Alibaba Group Holding’s family of large language models - the technology underpinning generative artificial intelligence (AI) services like ChatGPT - has been ranked among the world’s top 10 open-source models.

Three of the four top 10-ranked Chinese LLMs were from the Tongyi Qianwen series, also known as Qwen, developed by e-commerce and cloud computing giant Alibaba, according to AI and machine-learning developer platform Hugging Face, which released its updated leaderboard with new metrics on Wednesday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Hangzhou-based Alibaba’s Qwen-72B-Instruct LLM topped the list with an average score of 43.02 across six benchmarks. This Qwen model was trained on 72 billion “parameters” - a machine-learning term for variables present in an AI system during training, which helps establish how data prompts yield the desired output.

“Qwen 72B [Instruct] is the king and Chinese open models are dominating overall,” Hugging Face co-founder and chief executive Clement Delangue said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday.

That particular Qwen model was credited for “its performance in maths, long-range reasoning and knowledge”, according to Wednesday’s post on Hugging Face developer community’s website.

Meanwhile, Alibaba’s Qwen-72B and Qwen1.5-110B models made it to the third and tenth spots, respectively, as of Thursday. The rankings are expected to change over time, as more LLMs get evaluated, according to Hugging Face.

The Yi-1.5-34B-Chat model from Beijing-based start-up 01.AI was ranked seventh. The firm was founded in 2023 by prominent venture capitalist Lee Kai-fu, who was formerly president at Google China.

The lofty recognition of Alibaba’s LLMs shows the company’s rapid progress in AI on the back of its strong commitment to open-source development. Tongyi Qianwen was opened to third-party developers over several months already.

Open source gives public access to a program’s source code, allowing third-party software developers to modify or share its design, fix broken links or scale up its capabilities. Open-source technologies have been a huge contributor to China’s flourishing tech industry over the past few decades.

Facebook parent Meta Platforms’ AI model took second spot behind Alibaba in Hugging Face’s top 10 list. One LLM from Microsoft, a major backer of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, was ranked sixth.

The Hugging Face community said on Wednesday that its methodology for ranking AI models added more metrics, such as complex problems of around 1,000 words in length, at a time when AI “performances are plateauing”.

Since the Hugging Face ranking is focused on open-source-developed programs, it excludes advanced LLMs developed in a proprietary environment like OpenAI’s GPT.

The LMSYS Chatbot Arena ranking by the University of California, Berkeley, and the Large Model Systems Organisation was topped by GPT-4o, OpenAI’s latest LLM introduced in May. Alibaba’s Qwen2-72B-Instruct was ranked 19th.

 - SCMP