AI platform serves one billion people: Alibaba

(ECNS) -- Alibaba's AI platform now serves one billion people around the world, according to a statement made at the tech giant’s annual Apsara Computing Conference in Hangzhou on Thursday.

The platform runs over one trillion tasks every single day and processes one billion images, 1.2 million hours of video, 550,000 hours of voice messages and 500 billion natural language sentences.

The AI platform supports dozens of business units within the Alibaba ecosystem. For example, Ali Xiaomi, an AI-powered chatbot from Alibaba, handles 5 million spoken and written queries from 132 countries and regions in 11 languages every day.

Ma Jin, general manager of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Products and Solution Management, said the AI platform has been a driving factor in Alibaba’s success. 

Alibaba also introduced its first AI inference chip, a neural processing unit called Hanguang 800, saying it makes machine learning tasks dramatically faster and more energy efficient. The chip is already being used to power features on Alibaba's e-commerce sites, including product search and personalized recommendations.