PAI Full-Lifecycle AI Development Platform Overview - Platform for AI

Platform overview

Platform for AI (PAI) is Alibaba Cloud's AI development platform covering the full lifecycle: data annotation, model development, training, and deployment. PAI consists of the following core components:

Core component	Description	Scenario	Quick Start
Data Annotation (iTAG)	Annotate images, text, and videos. Offers fully managed annotation outsourcing services.	Data annotation	-
Data Science Workshop (DSW)	Cloud-based IDE for AI development. Start quickly if familiar with Notebooks or VSCode.	AI model development	DSW Quick Start
Machine Learning Designer	Over 140 built-in algorithm components for building models visually through a low-code, drag-and-drop interface.	Big data + AI model development	Designer Quick Start
Deep Learning Containers (DLC)	Create distributed or single-node training jobs without provisioning machines or configuring environments. Run training like local scripts.	Distributed model training	DLC Quick Start
Elastic Algorithm Service (EAS)	Deploy trained models as online inference services with simple configurations.	Deploy models as service APIs	EAS Quick Start
Model Gallery	Integrates DLC and EAS for zero-code open-source model training and deployment.	Zero-code open-source model training and deployment	Model Gallery Quick Start

Click the name of a component to learn more about its features.

Benefits

End-to-end AI development

Covers data annotation, model development, training, optimization, deployment, and AI operations.
Over 140 optimized built-in algorithm components.
Multiple development modes, deep big data engine integration, multi-framework support, and custom images.

Multiple open-source frameworks

Flink stream processing framework.
Deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Megatron, DeepSpeed) with optimizations beyond upstream versions.
Industry-standard frameworks (Spark, PySpark, MapReduce).

Industry-leading AI optimization

High-performance computing training framework for sparse scenarios, supporting tens to hundreds of billions of sparse features, hundreds of billions to trillions of samples, and distributed incremental training on up to 1,000 workers.
PAI-Blade accelerates mainstream models including ResNet-50 and Transformer+LM.

Flexible product delivery

Fully managed and semi-managed options on public cloud.
Deployment in various formats: AI High-Performance Computing clusters and lightweight offerings.
Periodic scheduling with DataWorks, separating production and development environments for data security and isolation.

Billing

Billing method	Description	Scenarios	Applicable components
Pay-as-you-go	Billed based on actual usage.	Short-term or unpredictable workloads: test environments, bursty demand, initial project phases.	Designer, DSW, DLC, EAS
Subscription	Prepaid resources purchased monthly or yearly.	Long-term, stable workloads. Fixed duration costs less than pay-as-you-go.	DSW, DLC, EAS
Resource plan	Prepaid quota package for specific resources.	Large volume of specific resources. Resource quota packages offer better pricing.	DSW
Savings plan	Prepaid discount plan.	Commit to specific spending over a period to receive lower pay-as-you-go rates.	DSW, EAS
Pay-by-inference-duration	Charged only for actual inference duration during service invocation—no cost for service deployment. Resources scale elastically based on request volume.	Serverless inference workloads with unpredictable or variable demand, handling high-concurrency requests and dynamic loads.	EAS

Get started

Get started with PAI: Get started with PAI.

Use cases

LLM deployment and fine-tuning: Deploy a large language model (LLM) application in 5 minutes using EAS ｜ Deploy DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 models with one click ｜ Deploy, fine-tune, and evaluate Qwen3 series models .
Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC): AI art: Deploy SDWebUI ｜ Generate high-definition long videos using EasyAnimate ｜ AI video generation: Deploy ComfyUI .
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): LLM RAG chatbot (v0.3.x) ｜ Build a DeepSeek+RAG Q&A application flow for the finance and healthcare realms .

FAQ

Q: Why is my PAI DSW instance failing to start or stop, and how can I release it?

See DSW FAQ - Instance startup and release.

Q: Why is my PAI EAS service invocation failing and how can I troubleshoot it?

See EAS FAQ - Service invocation.