PANews reported on March 13 that according to Bloomberg, Alibaba Group launched an artificial intelligence model R1-Omni that can read human emotions and made it available for free download in an effort to compete with OpenAI. The model is seen as a competitor to OpenAI's GPT-4.5, which can recognize emotional clues in text but is expensive (US$200 per month).

Developed by Tongyi Lab, R1-Omni can infer a person's emotional state through video analysis, and describe their clothing and surroundings, enhancing computer vision capabilities. This model is an upgrade of the previous open source model HumanOmni.