Citron Research has put its spotlight on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) as the Hong Kong-based e-commerce juggernaut released Qwen 2, an updated version of LLM provider Qwen 1.5.

Citron dove into Qwen 2 on Friday with a positive take on Alibaba's launch of the newest version.

"There's too much negativity, hate, and unfounded promotion in stock commentary," Citron said on X.

"Time to focus on something Citron and Ryan Cohen agree on: $BABA." Cohen founded pet-focused e-commerce company Chewy in 2011.

Citron, founded by Andrew Left in 2007, focuses on identifying fraud and terminal business models, having published over 150 reports on stocks, according to its website. The goal of Citron is to "provide truthful information in an entertaining format to the investing public," Left said.

Also read: Alibaba's New AI Model Claims to Beat OpenAI's GPT-4 in Language Skills

Left said that Alibaba's shares "could be ready for mainland buyers" through Stock Connect by Sept. 9 and that the debut of Qwen 2, which recently outperformed LAMA's client growth, has not been factored into Alibaba's share performance.

"Retail investors in China, take note!" Left wrote on X. "This IS the future."

Introducing Qwen 2 on Friday, Alibaba said the newest iteration offers pretrained and instruction-tuned models of Qwen2-0.5B, Qwen2-1.5B, Qwen2-7B, Qwen2-57B-A14B and Qwen2-72B. It is also trained on data in 27 additional languages besides English and Chinese, Alibaba said.

Alibaba also said that Qwen 2 features state-of-the-art performance in a large number of benchmark evaluations, significantly improved performance in coding and mathematics and extended context length support up to 128K tokens with Qwen2-7B-Instruct and Qwen2-72B-Instruct.

Alibaba's shares were down 1.8% to $78.52 at the time of publication Friday.

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