Alibaba's latest AI model reads emotions

Staff reporter and agencies

Alibaba (9988) has released a new artificial intelligence model that it says can read emotions, in an apparent bid to outpace OpenAI's latest offering.

This came as the tech giant's chairman said the global AI market has the potential to be worth at least US$10 trillion (HK$78 trillion).

In two demonstrations, Alibaba's Tongyi Lab researchers showed their new open source R1-Omniinferring the emotional stateof a person in a video while also offering descriptions of their clothes and environment. It adds another layer of understanding to so-called computer vision, and is anenhancedversion of another open-source model,HumanOmni, authored by the same lead researcher, Zhao Jiaxing.

Alibaba's effort to carve out a leading position in AI was accelerated by DeepSeek's splashy debut in January, and the e-commerce leader is now pushing out new releases of AI tools and apps in several arenas.

It benchmarked its Qwen modelagainst DeepSeek,secureda major partnership with Apple for AI on iPhones, and now looks to be taking on OpenAI as well. It'sofferingR1-Omni for users to download for free on Hugging Face.

Also yesterday, chairman Joseph Tsai Chung-Hsinsaid at a forum in Singapore that the market size of AI has the potential to hit US$10 trillion or larger, which would surpass that of transportation and medical insurance.

Tsai also thinks equity research analysts would probably be replaced by AI, as the burgeoning technology will perform well in writing a report about Nvidia or Apple.

Tsai also hailed open-source models, which he believes would benefit small and medium-sized enterprises and lead to the prosperity of AI applications in the future. He added that AI is not a game only for giants.

In addition, the chief said people underestimate the significance of President Xi Jinping's meeting with the country's most prominent entrepreneurs.

In mid-February, Xi hosted a symposium with Alibaba founder Jack Ma Yun and other leaders of private companies and encouraged them to make more achievements to boost the economy, which already propelled the Chinese equities to surge.

In other news, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (1398) said it launched an 80 billion yuan (HK$85.60 billion) technology and innovation fund to support "hard technology" via equity investment.