November 18 — International market research firm Omdia has recently released its inaugural China Large Model Vendor Competitiveness Ranking Report, naming Alibaba Cloud as a Leader and ranking it first in both the Strategy & Execution and Capabilities dimensions. Omdia projects that from 2024 to 2030, the generative AI (GenAI) market in the Asia-Pacific region will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 53%, with the majority of growth coming from China.
The Omdia report notes that China is the most active market in AI development, with the total number of foundation models in the country exceeding 230 as of January 2024. Based on multiple dimensions—including general model capabilities, domain-specific capabilities, vendor execution capabilities, solution richness, strategy and innovation, and market influence—Omdia conducted a comprehensive assessment of the top 12 Chinese model vendors, categorizing them into three quadrants by score: Leaders, Challengers, and Aspirants.
Alibaba Cloud was placed in the Leaders quadrant and ranked first in the two most critical dimensions: Strategy & Execution and Capabilities. The Omdia report points out that the Tongyi large model performs at a top-tier level across numerous mainstream benchmarks, that Alibaba Cloud is the market leader in China's commercial foundation model space, and that it has consistently been a key player in the open-source foundation model arena.
It is understood that Alibaba Cloud is one of the earliest technology companies in the industry to lay out large model technologies. Since the launch of Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) in 2023, its capabilities have been iteratively upgraded, securing top positions on multiple authoritative large model leaderboards including Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard and OpenCompass. Globally, the number of derivative models based on the Qwen series has exceeded 78,000, making it the largest open-source model family in the world.
According to Omdia's Asia & Oceania Artificial Intelligence Software Market Forecast, the generative AI market in the Asia-Pacific region was estimated at US$1.6 billion in 2023, with a projected CAGR of 53% from 2024 to 2030. China's GenAI market is driving the majority of this growth, and Chinese vendors are also actively expanding into overseas markets.
This presents new opportunities for China's large model vendors. Omdia believes that beyond possessing a world-class foundation model, Alibaba Cloud has a comprehensive AI infrastructure and offers MaaS (Model as a Service)—which is Alibaba Cloud's key advantage. It is understood that Alibaba Cloud operates 29 public cloud regions and 87 availability zones globally, and developers can develop generative AI models and applications through the one-stop large model service platform "Alibaba Cloud Bailian." To date, the Tongyi large model has served over 300,000 enterprise customers.