Alibaba on Wednesday said that it has made its video generation artificial intelligence models free to use, further ramping up competition with rivals like OpenAI. The Chinese giant said it is open sourcing four models that are part of its Wan2.1 series, the latest version of the company’s foundational AI model that can generate images and video from text and image inputs. These models will be available via Alibaba Cloud’s Model Scope and Hugging Face, a huge repository of AI models. They will be accessible to academics, researchers and commercial institutions globally. Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares closed nearly 5% higher. Open-source AI tech has been thrown into the spotlight since Chinese firm DeepSeek rattled global markets in January, after claiming its artificial intelligence model was trained at a fraction of the cost of leading AI players and on less-advanced Nvidia chips. DeepSeek’s model is open source, like Alibaba’s, meaning it can be downloaded and modified by others. Open source differs from proprietary models such as those created by OpenAI and do not produce revenue for companies. Open sourcing a technology serves a number of purposes, including driving innovation and building a community around a product. A debate is currently swirling about whether AI models will become commoditized.

Full report : Alibaba releases Wan 2.1, a family of open-source AI models for generating images and videos, available globally on Alibaba Cloud’s ModelScope and Hugging Face.