Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit launched a novel AI coder that is touted as capable of building an application “in minutes,” sparking plenty of discourse among software programmers in mainland China. The AI coder, part of Alibaba Cloud’s AI programming tool called Tongyi Lingma, can perform a set of automated tasks. The system is powered by Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qianwen family of LLMs—the technology behind GenAI services like ChatGPT—and improves code development efficiency “by over 10 times.”