BEIJING (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)