Alibaba has open-sourced its Wan 2.1 video- and image-generating AI models, heating up an already competitive space. The Wan 2.1 family, which has four models, is said to produce “highly realistic” images and videos from text and images. The company has since December been previewing a new reasoning model, QwQ-Max, indicating it will be open-sourced when fully released. The move comes after another Chinese AI company, DeepSeek, released its R1 reasoning model for free download and use, triggering demand for more open-source artificial intelligence.

“DeepSeek even expanded its commitment to the open-source community and is in the process of releasing five code repositories behind its service,” writes Engadget, emphasizing China’s active role in AI. Alibaba, Engadget points out, was one of the companies that has been developing generative AI technology since “the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT two years ago.”

Alibaba has made a Wan 2.1 web demo available. The four variants of Wan 2.1 are T2V-1.3B, T2V-14B for video genereation and I2V-14B-720P and I2V-14B-480P for image output. The ‘B’ designators indicate how many billion parameters the model accepts, with the higher numbers able to process input, resulting in more accurate output.

“Alibaba introduced the latest version of its video- and image-generating AI model in January — later shortening its name to Wan from Wanx — touting its ability to generate highly realistic visuals,” per U.S. News & World Report, which adds that “the firm has since highlighted its top ranking on VBench, a leaderboard for video generative models.” where it is currently number one.

Free access to the Wan 2.1 models is available on Hugging Face and on GitHub via Aliababa Cloud’s own ModelScope platform, where anyone from researchers to commercial entities can download and modify the platforms.

Alibaba Cloud initially launched ModelScope in China in late 2022 “with over 300 ready-to-deploy AI models developed by Alibaba DAMO Academy (‘DAMO’), Alibaba’s global research initiative,” according to the company blog.

“The platform currently contains more than 5,000 models created by Alibaba, as well as other Chinese AI firms, including Baichuan from startup Baichuan Intelligence and the Qingyan chatbot system from Zhipu,” AI Business wrote at the time of the English-launguage international launch in June 2024.

“Chinese firms in particular have been pushing forward with open source models, Alibaba’s and DeepSeek’s now among the most popular used globally,” writes CNBC, adding that Meta is the leading U.S. player “in the open source charge with its Llama models.”