JD.com Joins China’s AI Race With a Model for Enterprise Use

Jane Zhang, Bloomberg News

The JD.com Inc. headquarters during a ceremony marking company's 20th anniversary and 6.18 shopping event in Beijing, China, on Sunday, June 18, 2023. JD.com is on track to emerge from a record sales funk as a bounce-back in parts of China's consumer economy and a $1.4 billion discounting program help revive its online commerce business, a top executive said. Source: /Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- China’s second-largest e-commerce platform JD.com Inc. unveiled a large language model for enterprise use, joining domestic peers including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. in the race to develop emerging artificial intelligence applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

JD.com will first roll out the service, called ChatRhino, for its own use in areas including e-commerce, logistics and marketing. The company will extend the offering to enterprise clients starting in the first half of 2024, according to Cao Peng, chair of JD.com’s technology committee and president of JD Cloud.

“We want to use our model to create enterprise value. We shouldn’t just use AI models for chatting and drawing,” Cao said during the company’s annual tech summit in Beijing on Thursday.

JD.com, which jumped as much as 6.2% in Hong Kong, will also launch a LLM platform for developers next month.

--With assistance from Lianting Tu.