Questions are answered - Alibaba bot knows (most of) what it’s talking about

By SHE Xiaochen

Tongyi Qianwen, the chatbot developed by tech giant Alibaba, has been open to selected companies for testing since Friday. Jiemian News was invited to have a head-to-head with the large language model (LLM) application.

A Jiemian News reporter prepared a list of questions involving workplace culture, marketing strategies, science, arts, and self-awareness.

How do you plan to impress the client?

The first question was a pretty straightforward one, based on a standard business school topic. What are the ideal qualities of a business proposal that are guaranteed to impress the client? Tongyi pointed to an inspirational article that dealt with professionalism, innovative thinking, teamwork and outcome orientation.

A senior marketing executive described the bot’s response as a “perfect answer,” so there is not a lot to argue about there, but not much to be impressed by either.

When facing similar probes, Tongyi showed itself to be jolly good at making lists and very skilled in hashing out arguments.

Why is the grass green, daddy?

We asked Tongyi the kind of question that plagues every parent of a four-year-old child: “Why doesn’t it snow in summer?”

Tongyi came back at us with a similar question, much as a parent might: “Well, why doesn't it hail in summer?”

It was a strange response, considering that it does, in fact, hail in summer, quite a lot. We pressed on with our line of questioning, and Tongyi went on to explain how different hail and snow were.

Tongyi had steered us away from what it didn’t know and directed us to what it did, as any parent would.

Jiemian News then asked Tongyi to write a story.

The plot was simple enough - the protagonist meets an old friend at a music festival. Tongyi offered a bland four-scene script about two old friends running into one another and enjoying a festival together.

The story lacked tension, conflict and resolution. On reflection, this was precisely what it had been asked to write. With a better muse to inspire it, Tongyi might have better stories to tell.

What’s on at the movies?

Tongyi’s database seems to be lagging a little. When Jiemian News asked for a list of the latest movies screened in the cinemas, it seemed to be exactly the kind of question the model would deal with easily.

But it didn’t, and provided a list of movies from two years ago, before Tongyi was even born. It wouldn’t be too great a leap to be asking for movie recommendations.

In reality, we’d be asking Tongyi to understand what we like. Right now, it doesn’t even know what’s on at the multiplex.

I’d like to thank…

To conclude our little chat, we invited Tongyi to talk about itself and explain how it was born.

Alibaba started working on large models in January 2020. In September last year, Tongyi was presented to the public. It identified itself as an LLM developed by Damo Academy, Alibaba’s research institute, and thanked the researchers for their hard work.