Alibaba’s Aliyun cloud launches DT PAI, an artificial intelligence service

Alibaba today announced the launch of DT PAI, a new service in its Aliyun public cloud that will be able to handle machine learning processes.

Aliyun will launch a free public trial of the service for a select group of early users in the next few weeks, DT PAI product manager Xiao Wei told VentureBeat in an email.

“DTPAI contains matured and advanced ML algorithms whose effectiveness are verified by Alibaba’s profound data scenarios in Taobao, Tmall or Alipay business,” Wei wrote. The service can deal with workloads such as classification, clustering, feature abstraction, and large-scale statistics, he wrote. The service will even be able to perform an increasingly popular type of artificial intelligence known as deep learning.

When it comes to logistic regression, a type of statistical model, DT PAI “can process data with 10 billion plus dimensions of features and 100 billion plus of records,” Wei wrote.

It’s not surprising to see Alibaba expand its cloud like this. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have both released cloud services for machine learning in the past year. And Alibaba is quickly revving up to match the capabilities of those public clouds. Last month, Aliyun announced plans to add graphic processing units (GPUs) and solid state drives (SSDs), and Alibaba also committed to spending $1 billion to expand Aliyun in Japan, Europe and the Middle East.

Alibaba is indeed based in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, far from the West Coast, where Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are based. But the company is obviously looking to expand its business outside of China.

“We are happy to serve users worldwide and we support English,” Wei wrote.