DT PAI: Alibaba's cloud arm launches China's first artifical intelligence

Alibaba Group’s cloud computing arm Aliyun announced the launch of China’s first artificial intelligence platform, DT PAI. The platform will allow developers to analyse massive amounts of data to produce insights that will predict user behaviour and industry trends, all using “simple drag-and-drop” icons. The DT PAI platform will integrate core algorithm bases from Alibaba and include feature engineering, large-scale machine learning and deep learning. [caption id=“attachment_2009425” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Data[/caption] “With DT PAI users need only to use mouse to drag standardised modules, link them, and set parameters before proceeding to application development, thus bypassing the need for traditional coding,” the company said in its statement. “Our goal is to create a one-stop AI development, publishing and sharing platform through data, calculations and data connections, all with the aim of using AI to drive innovation in all aspects of life,” said Xiao Wei, senior product expert, Aliyun. “In the past, the field of artificial intelligence was only open to a very small number of qualified developers and required the use of specialised tools. Such an approach was prone to error and redundancy. However, DT PAI allows developers with little or no experience in the field to construct a data application from scratch in a much shorter period of time. What used to take days can be completed within minutes,” added Wei. In the future it is expected that DT PAI will have a significant impact on society. For instance, shoppers will be able to simply snap a photo of an outfit they like, and it will immediately show them the purchase page for the same outfit on Alibaba’s shopping platform, Taobao Marketplace, the company added. DT PAI is based on Open Data Processing Service (ODPS), an Aliyun platform capable of handling massive volumes of data. ODPS is capable of handling 100PB data in just six hours, the equivalent of 100 million HD films.