Ant Group Establishes the AI Innovation R＆D Department NextEvo

Ant Group has established an internal AI innovation research and development department called ‘NextEvo’, which is led by Xu Peng, the Vice President of Ant Group.

Xu Peng worked at Google for 11 years, responsible for leading the core technology development of Google Translate and participating in algorithm research and development for Google Display Advertising System. NextEvo is an elite department within Ant Group’s AI division, reportedly responsible for all core technology research and development of Ant AI, including the development of the Ant Bailing large language model.

In 2023, the department published more than 30 AI international top journal and conference papers. NextEvo’s open-source intelligent large-scale distributed deep learning system DLRover and GPU memory + transmission optimization open-source project GLake filled the gap in technology open-source in the vertical field of AI in China.

Last November, it was reported that Ant Group’s Bailing large language model has been registered. It adopts the Transformer architecture and is trained on a trillion-level token corpus, supporting window lengths of up to 32K. In addition to the Bailing large language model, Ant Group also stated that they are developing the Bailing multimodal model and have already conducted internal testing. They have formed a complete technical chain including underlying infrastructure for large models, basic large models, industry-specific large models, and application products.

In September last year, Ant Group open-sourced the CodeFuse project. According to official information, it is a large language model exclusively developed by Ant Group for code generation. It can provide intelligent suggestions and real-time support based on developers’ input, helping them automatically generate code, add comments, generate test cases, fix and optimize code, etc., in order to improve development efficiency.

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