Alibaba Releases AI Model That Reads Emotions to Take On OpenAI

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has released a new artificial intelligence model that it says can read emotions, in an apparent bid to outpace OpenAI’s latest model.

In two demonstrations, Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab researchers showed their new open source R1-Omni inferring the emotional state of a person in a video while also offering descriptions of their clothes and environment. It adds another layer of understanding to so-called computer vision, and is an enhanced version of another open source model, HumanOmni, authored by the same lead researcher, Jiaxing Zhao.