Alibaba Completes Three-Year Regulatory Overhaul

China’s State Administration of Market Regulation announced that Alibaba Group has completed a three-year rectification period following a $2.75 billion fine imposed in 2021 for monopolistic practices. The fine was issued after the e-commerce giant was found to have restricted merchants from working with rival platforms.^[1]  

The regulator noted that Alibaba's rectification efforts have achieved satisfactory results and stated that it will continue to guide the company in regulating its operations and improving compliance.

Alibaba described the regulator’s announcement as a “new starting point for development” and said it would continue to support the growth of the platform economy and create value for society.

Last month, it was announced that Alibaba Group Holding, the Chinese e-commerce giant, is developing Tora, a video-generating tool based on OpenAI's Sora. Detailed in a paper released by five Alibaba researchers, Tora uses the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, the same framework used by OpenAI's Sora, a text-to-video model launched in February.

Tora is the first trajectory-oriented DiT framework for video generation, ensuring precise movement along specified paths while mimicking real-world dynamics. The researchers adapted OpenSora's workflow to transform raw videos into high-quality video-text pairs and used an optical flow estimator for trajectory extraction.

In February, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, introduced its first artificial intelligence (AI)-powered text-to-video generation model, Sora.

Using OpenAI's GPT-3 language model, Sora turns text descriptions into video content, helping content creators, filmmakers, and storytellers with a new way to create visuals.

Sora can create detailed scenes with multiple actors, various motion styles, and precise backgrounds.