(Yicai) Dec. 19 -- Alibaba Group Holding has divided its Tongyi Qianwen large language model team to accelerate the integration of artificial intelligence across consumer-facing products, sources familiar with the matter told Yicai.

Tongyi Laboratory's technology development team will remain within Alibaba Cloud, while the application team will shift to Alibaba's Intelligent Information Business Group, according to the sources.

The current head of the IIBG is Wu Jia who stepped down from his e-commerce roles last month to exclusively focus on the group that has been integrating AI features into services such as productivity app Quark. At that time, Wu was rumored to be zeroing in on AI expansion across Alibaba's apps.

Zhang Shule, an analyst specializing in information technology and gaming, told Yicai that while Tongyi's application team prioritizes market expansion, the separation will enable Alibaba to better test new technologies while incorporating market feedback into LLM development.

Despite Alibaba's claims that Tongyi matches OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo, the model faces significant competition and engagement challenges. In June, Tongyi ranked fourth among artificial intelligence-generated content apps, according to a report by QuestMobile. Its ratio of daily average users to monthly active users was 14.3 percent, and users were online 4.3 days per month. Moreover, the uninstall rate of 62 percent was nearly double that of Baidu's Ernie Bot.

Editor: Emmi Laine