Finance

Alibaba launches AI search for small biz, says purchase intent jumps

Published

2 days ago

November 12, 2024

Alibaba International promotes its e-commerce platform for small businesses at the Canton Fair in Guangdong, China, on Oct. 16, 2024.

Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images

BEIJING — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on Tuesday unveiled an artificial intelligence-powered search engine for small businesses in Europe and the Americas to source supplies.

It’s an attempt to leverage ChatGPT-like tech to increase sales. Initial tests showed businesses’ purchase intent using the new tool increased by 40% versus traditional search engines, according to Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com and vice president of Alibaba International.

The product is called Accio, after the spell used in the Harry Potter fantasy series for summoning objects. The initial version is web-based and supports English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish, according to the company.

With a few text or image prompts, businesses can use Accio to find wholesale products — including analysis on their popularity with consumers and projected profit, according to demos viewed by CNBC.

Examples shown included helping a sports entrepreneur to build a line of pickleball products. At the end of the search, the tool lists a number of procurement options for the business to discuss directly with each supplier.

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The tech uses generative AI from Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen large language model, Zhang said, declining to confirm whether the product integrates AI from other companies.

An LLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on large amounts of data. A model supports generative AI applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts. To be sure, several businesses are still in the experimentation phase with AI and many firms are yet to find a way of monetizing the technology.

Accio uses data from 50 million businesses on Alibaba International’s platform, and publicly available industry information, Zhang said. He said the tool incorporates 1 billion product listings and documents covering industries across more than 100 markets from Alibaba.com, the company’s business-to-business platform which sells to companies outside China.

Businesses based in Europe and North America are the largest group of buyers, the company said.

Alibaba’s international arm in October announced an updated version of an AI translation tool to help merchants reach customers in other countries. The company claimed the tech’s translation capabilities beat that of Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.

The international business has grown rapidly in recent years, but Alibaba’s main revenue driver remains its domestic e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall. In August 2023, management told investors that “the Taobao app has the greatest potential to become a one stop smart portal for life and consumption enabled by AI.”

During the weeks-long Singles Day shopping festival that wrapped up Monday, more than half of over 500 merchants selling on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com used a generative AI-enabled tool, according to a survey by Bain & Company.

Those features include AI for customer service and generating content. The survey found 56% of respondents said AI tools had “high positive impact” on improving productivity.

Alibaba is scheduled to report quarterly results on Friday.

—CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.

Finance

Chinese AI startup Shengshu launches image-to-video tool, rivaling Sora

Published

2 hours ago

November 13, 2024

Business Finance News

Pictured here is an AI-generated clip from Vidu’s website. The tool can create videos from text or image prompts.

Evelyn Cheng | CNBC

BEIJING — Beijing-based Shengshu Technology on Wednesday said that its artificial intelligence-powered text-to-video tool Vidu will now be able to generate videos by combining images.

Vidu already allows users worldwide to create 8-second clips based on written prompts. While OpenAI — the maker of ChatGPT — in February revealed that its AI model Sora could generate one-minute videos from text, it has yet to release that publicly.

Vidu’s new AI feature can combine three pictures — such as a shirt, person and moped — into a video of the person wearing the shirt and driving the moped through a scene, Shengshu said.

Other platforms claim they can turn text or images into videos using AI, but the quality of output varies. The breakthrough that Shengshu claims is the ability to take three unique images and integrate them with visual consistency into an AI-generated video.

“Very early on we pinpointed [visual consistency] as the problem, and wanted to solve it well,” Fan Bao, chief technology officer at Shengshu, said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.

Vidu launched in April and its ability to turn two profile photos into lifelike videos of people hugging went viral on TikTok.

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The AI video generator is already making money from advertisers, animators and other businesses, Shengshu co-founder and CEO Jiayu Tang said in Mandarin, according to a CNBC translation. He said monthly usage rates per customer can range from 100,000 yuan to 1 million yuan ($13,871 to $138,711).

To address copyright issues, Tang said a company might sign a deal with an artist that allows the AI to mimic the artist’s style of painting for an advertisement. He said he hadn’t seen significant legal cases around consumers’ use of images.

Tang added that Vidu doesn’t allow the public to generate content using images of celebrities or “sensitive” individuals. He said the AI tool also bans nudes and violent images. As for personal photos, Tang said Vidu destroys the data in accordance with general data protection regulation — a global benchmark.

Shengshu was founded last year with backers including Baidu Ventures, Alibaba-affiliate Ant Group, Chinese startup Zhipu AI, Qiming Venture Partners and Beijing city, according to PitchBook.

Tang said Vidu’s AI runs off rented cloud servers in China and abroad.