A technical innovation has allowed Alibaba Group Holding, one of the leading players in China’s artificial intelligence boom, to develop a new generation of foundation models that match the strong performance of larger predecessors while being significantly smaller and more cost efficient. Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing division of Alibaba, unveiled on Friday a new generation of large language models that it said heralded “the future of efficient LLMs”. The new models are nearly 13...