Alibaba Cloud has released Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, a new AI model the company claims is efficient enough to run on edge devices like mobile phones and laptops. Boasting a relatively light 7-billion parameter footprint, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B understands text, images, audio and video and generates real-time responses in text and natural speech. Alibaba says its combination of compact size and multimodal capabilities is “unique,” offering “the perfect foundation for developing agile, cost-effective AI agents that deliver tangible value, especially intelligent voice applications.” One example would be using a phone’s camera to help a vision impaired-person navigate their environment.

“Amid China’s AI fervor accelerated by DeepSeek, Alibaba and other generative AI competitors have been releasing new, cost-effective models and products at an unprecedented pace,” writes CNBC.

The new model rivals “specialized single-modality models of comparable size,” excelling on OmniBench tests in “real-time voice interaction, natural and robust speech generation and end-to-end speech instruction following,” according to Alibaba Cloud’s announcement.

Qwen2.5-Omni-7B is open-sourced on Hugging Face and Github, Alibaba Cloud claims it has made over 200 generative AI models available to the open-source community.

Its efficiency and high performance are rooted in design that incorporates “Thinker-Talker Architecture, which separates text generation (through Thinker) and speech synthesis  (through Talker) to minimize interference among different modalities for high-quality output,” Alibaba explains.

Alibaba Cloud “has been releasing AI products at a frenetic pace since going all-in on the technology this year,” writes Bloomberg, noting Alibaba Cloud released its Qwen2.5 Max “just days after DeepSeek made waves in January” with the models R1 and Janus-Pro-7B.

Earlier this month, Alibaba released Quark, a search engine reinvented an agentic “AI super assistant,” debuted its own reasoning model, R1-Omni, and announced a partnership with AI startup Butterfly Effect, the company behind the viral “general agent” Manus.

This week the Alibaba Group teamed with BMW to produce AI for cars in China. “BMW will adopt AI cockpit technology from Alibaba-backed Banma for its upcoming models tailored for the Chinese market,” Bloomberg reports.