BEIJING, Feb 26 (Reuters) - Chinese e-commerce leader

Alibaba said on Wednesday its video- and

image-generating artificial intelligence model Wan 2.1 is now

publicly available - or open source - in a move likely to

increase its uptake and intensify competition in AI.

Alibaba's announcement follows similar action from startup

DeepSeek whose ostensibly low-cost open-source models earlier

this year generated excitement among technology investors and

surprise in the capital-intensive sector with performance akin

to those of more established rivals such as OpenAI.

Alibaba said it has released four variants of Wan 2.1 -

T2V-1.3B, T2V-14B, I2V-14B-720P and I2V-14B-480P - which

generate images and videos from text and image input. The "14B"

indicates the variant accepts 14 billion parameters, meaning it

can process far more input to yield more accurate results.

The models are available globally on Alibaba Cloud's

ModelScope and HuggingFace platforms for academic, research and

commercial.

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.

The firm has since highlighted its top ranking on VBench, a

leaderboard for video generative models, where it leads in

functionality such as multi-object interaction.

On Tuesday, Alibaba released a preview of reasoning model

QwQ-Max which it plans to make open source upon full release.

It also announced plans this week to invest at least 380

billion yuan ($52 billion) over the next three years to bolster

cloud computing and AI infrastructure.

($1 = 7.2579 Chinese yuan renminbi)