As it expands its products in the rapidly expanding AI market, Alibaba Group announced on Friday the beta release of an AI image generator. 

Tongyi Wanxiang, an image generator, will fight against OpenAI's DALL-E and Midjourney Inc.'s Midjourney, two rivals with big international followings that are situated in the US. 

Tongyi Qianwen, a text generator akin to ChatGPT that was introduced in April, was also issued by Alibaba Cloud, which was recently created following a major revamp that divided the Chinese tech giant into six groups. 

Following the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, a number of significant Chinese IT businesses are making strong efforts to roll out AI products and services. According to McKinsey, generative AI might potentially boost the global economy by $7.3 trillion annually. 

Recently, AI picture generators were also introduced by SenseTime Group and Baidu, although generative AI services have not yet obtained regulatory approval for widespread distribution in China. 

A developer-friendly AI tool called ModelScopeGPT has also been released by Alibaba Cloud. 

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Friday, the Tongyi Wanxiang image generator—which loosely translates as "truth from tens of thousands of pictures"—was unveiled. 

Its stock jumped more than 3% on the news, currently still up 2.5%. 

(Sources: investing.com, reuters.com)