Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding is now testing a ChatGPT-style tool that can hold conversations.  An Alibaba spokesperson said Damo Academy, the company's research institute for cutting-edge technologies, is now doing internal testing of the conversational AI service. Alibaba did not say when it could publicly release the chatbot tool. A report claims that the company may merge the AI technology with its workplace communication app, DingTalk. Damo, which stands for Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum, and Outlook, has been working in areas like natural language processing and generative AI since its launch in 2017, a spokesperson said. In 2021, the Alibaba academy released a 27-billion-parameter language model called Pretraining for Language Understanding and Generation. Since ChatGPT's unveiling in late November, a handful of major Chinese AI tech companies have announced plans for similar AI technologies. Chinese search engine giant Baidu said it will finish testing its "Ernie bot" in March. Chinese e-commerce group and Alibaba rival JD.com is also planning to incorporate ChatGPT-like tech into some products.