Alibaba debuts Wuying Cloudbook at Apsara Conference 2022. Photo credit: Alibaba Group

Alibaba Group’s cloud computing arm unveiled an ultra-thin cloud-powered laptop dubbed Wuying Cloudbook on Wednesday.

The device, powered by Alibaba Cloud’s Wuying Architecture, is the latest addition to its Wuying cloud computer family, and is part of its drive to make the benefits of cloud computing accessible.

“Wuying Architecture is a powerful extension and expansion of the workplace,” said Jiang Jiangwei, general manager of Infrastructure Products at Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba launched the product at its annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou.

The device provides unlimited cloud computing power to run compute-intensive software such as video rendering and image generation.

This frees users from storage limitations by allowing them to run workloads on the cloud without downloading and installing software on local devices. Users can run multiple operating systems simultaneously on Wuying Cloudbook, including Windows, Linux, or Android.

The laptop also makes it easier and safer for people to collaborate when working remotely while minimizing security vulnerabilities.

Cloud Computing

Cloud will deliver over $1 trillion in value, with $430 billion in internet technology (IT) cost optimization, risk reduction and operations digitalization, according to a report by research firm McKinsey.

Cloud’s value goes beyond IT, and cloud computing will create $770 billion in value in innovation-driven growth, accelerated product development and hyper-scalability, the report concluded.

“As more customers are speeding up with their cloud adoption, we have been upgrading our cloud-based resources, services and tools to become serverless, more intelligent and digitalized,” said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud at the conference held in Hangzhou where Alibaba is based.

Alibaba Cloud’s innovations are keeping pace. Its database PolarDB, data warehouse AnalyticDB and ApsaraDB for Relational Database Service will become serverless.

Since the cloud provider can allocate resources on demand and run on a pay-as-go billing model, it can help businesses in the internet industry cut costs by half.

From the Source

Alibaba Cloud launched an open-source community at the Apsara conference to make over 300 AI models from the group’s research institute DAMO Academy freely available.

These models include Alibaba’s proprietary models trained on relatively large datasets in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing.

Open source has played an important role in the IT software industry in the past two decades, and it will help make AI more accessible in the next few years, according to Zhang.

Developers and researchers can download the models for free and customize them for their AI research. They can also finetune the pre-trained models for their development or run them online with computing power support from Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud said it would open-source more models on the platform from DAMO Academy and third-party developers.