For the first time in history! Milan Winter Olympics builds the official Olympic large model based on Alibaba Qianwen

The Milan Winter Olympics is about to open, marking the ninth year of Alibaba’s partnership with the IOC (International Olympic Committee).

We have achieved many firsts together, from fully migrating core systems to the cloud to cloud broadcasting becoming mainstream, jointly advancing the comprehensive digitalization and intelligentization of the Olympics.

This Winter Olympics has become more intelligent thanks to AI.

Today, International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry announced at the International Broadcast Center that the IOC has built the first official large model in Olympic history based on Alibaba’s Qianwen.

Coventry highly praised the transformative significance of AI technology for this Winter Olympics. She stated that, supported by the Qianwen large model, the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics will showcase the intelligent future of the Olympic movement and will be the “most intelligent” Olympics in history.

Coventry said Alibaba has always been a “transformative partner” of the Olympic movement. She pointed out, “The technology of Alibaba’s Qianwen large model will bring smarter operations, deeper interaction, and new possibilities to the Olympics.”

The official Olympic large model has been deployed simultaneously for professional event management and public services.

On the event side, the IOC has launched the “National Olympic Committee AI Assistant” on its website for NOC staff worldwide.

International Olympic Committee AI Assistant

This assistant relies on the powerful multilingual understanding capabilities of the Qianwen large model and has read through millions of words of official manuals. Delegation members can ask questions in their native language to receive precise answers on issues ranging from qualification review to logistics scheduling.

On the public side, the IOC will also launch the “Olympics AI Assistant” based on the Qianwen large model on its official website (Olympics.com). This assistant will be open to global audiences, capable of answering real-time, accurate questions about event rules and Olympic history, bringing the public closer to the Olympics through AI technology.

Meanwhile, an automatic media description system developed based on the Qwen-VL model is also in operation during live broadcasts, identifying key events such as goals and fouls in real time and generating descriptions.

As the Milan Winter Olympics countdown reaches 100 days, Sotiris Salomouris, CTO of the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), stated that they will continue working with Alibaba to comprehensively upgrade the viewing experience.

To address the unique challenge of “uniform snowfield textures and lack of feature points causing visual blind spots” at the Winter Olympics, Alibaba Cloud adopted multi-model fusion algorithms, successfully solving the high-precision reconstruction of snowy scenes.

This technology has been deployed in 10 core competition venues for the Milan Winter Olympics, covering more than two-thirds of the events, including alpine skiing, ski jumping, and ice hockey. Global viewers will see clearer “bullet time” freeze frames and new “time slice” effects during broadcasts, allowing them to vividly see athletes’ full trajectories as they perform rapid flips in midair.

“Every Olympic Games leaves a unique legacy. The legacy of the Milan Winter Olympics will be intelligentization—specifically, AI-driven intelligence,” Coventry concluded. “This AI capability is the ‘eternal gift’ that the Milan Winter Olympics leaves to the world, and it will reshape the future of the Olympic movement.”