Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant known for its e-commerce operations, is giving people free access to its generative AI model capable of creating realistic videos and images from text and image prompts.
On Wednesday, Alibaba announced that it would make its AI model for video and image generation Wan 2.1 publicly available.
According to a report by Reuters, Alibaba announced that four models that are part of its Wan 2.1 series are now open source and can be downloaded and modified by users. Wan 2.1 can generate images and video from text and image inputs.
🌟 Big News from @alibaba_cloud! 🌟
Meet WanX – our next-gen AI model redefining video generation !🚀 Presenting mind-blowing demos from WanX 2.1！
🔥 Even more exciting:
WanX 2.1 will be OPEN-SOURCE !
Coming soon …#AIart #OpenSource pic.twitter.com/R1laOyJYAL— Wan (@Alibaba_Wan) February 20, 2025
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.
The news that Wan 2.1 is now publicly available — or open source — will undoubtedly further escalate competition with established rivals like OpenAI.
Alibaba video model Wan 2.1 looks very good actually. Very impressed.
HT: https://t.co/WPeZ8aYt3r https://t.co/9VtpwF2soi pic.twitter.com/19vCiJwW1k
— Gadgetify (@Gdgtify) February 25, 2025
Last month, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek unveiled an open-source AI image generator that it claims can outperform OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 — a move which has sent shockwaves through the U.S. stock market.
DeepSeek says its AI model, Janus-Pro-7B, is better than Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 3. The model is a major upgrade on its previous image generator, Janus, which was launched in late 2024. The multimodal AI can read, as well as generate images.
DeepSeek made Janus open-source and available to download from Hugging Face.
Open-source models differ from proprietary ones like those created by OpenAI, as they do not generate direct revenue for companies. Alibaba’s announcement comes amid ongoing debate over whether AI models will eventually become commoditized.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made detailed plans to restructure the start-up away from its original non-profit status and convert it to a for-profit company. However, earlier this month, Elon Musk made a $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI to disrupt Altman’s plans.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk says in a statement provided by his attorney Marc Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.”
