Alibaba Group, on Wednesday said it is developing a ChatGPT-style tool that is currently in internal testing, joining a race by tech companies globally to show they are up to speed on generative artificial intelligence (AI) developments. The Chinese e-commerce group’s statement came after the 21st Century Herald newspaper reported that Alibaba is developing a ChatGPT-like dialogue robot which is currently open to employees for testing When asked about the newspaper report, which also said that Alibaba might combine the technology with the group’s communication app DingTalk, Alibaba declined to comment. The company said it had been focused on large language models and generative AI for a number of years. Large language models are natural language processing systems which are trained on massive volumes of text, and are capable of answering and comprehending questions as well as generating new text. Alibaba’s U.S.-listed shares rose 3.2% premarket after the news Shares in a number of other Chinese AI technology companies have soared in the past few days due to investor excitement over Open.Ai’s ChatGPT, which can generate articles, essays and jokes in response to prompts and has been rated the fastest-growing consumer app in history.