GuShiio.com Article source: AI Pioneer Officer
Image source: Generated by AI
At the third quarter earnings call conference of fiscal year 2024, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming used the frequency of mentioning AI 12 times to send a clear signal to the capital market:This China Internet giant is completing another genetic transformation in its development history-it is growing into China’s core and most world-competitive AI giant.
Financial report data for the current quarter showed that Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group’s revenue increased by 13% year-on-year to 31.742 billion yuan, of which AI-related revenue achieved triple-digit growth for six consecutive months, becoming a key driving force for Alibaba’s future development.
Wu Yongming announced that in the next three years, Alibaba will invest more than 380 billion yuan in building cloud and AI hardware infrastructure.
Related reading: Ali 380 billion yuan to build the foundation of AI in China, Wu Yongming said AI will become the world’s largest industry
This sets a record for the largest investment ever made by China private enterprises in the field of cloud and AI hardware infrastructure construction, and also marks that Alibaba will become the foundation of the domestic AI ecosystem.
Alibaba also disclosed for the first time that as Asia’s largest cloud computing service provider, Alibaba Cloud has built a computing power network covering 30 regions around the world, supporting the daily processing of more than 50PB of training data.
The deep logic of this strategic shift has long been foreshadowing Alibaba’s 25-year development trajectory.
From the transaction matchmaking platform in the Taobao era, to the payment infrastructure built by Alipay, to Cainiao’s reconstruction of the logistics industry map, to Alibaba Cloud’s construction of China’s number one and second largest digital empowerment base, this company has always been solving the problem of commercial operating systems.
Today, when the AI technology revolution resonates with the deepening development of the industrial economy, Alibaba’s transformation path once again shows clear continuity-transforming its business ecosystem, which has been tempered for more than 20 years, into a basic foundation and super foundation for cultivating AI technology. Test ground.
At the same time, in the United States, a joint venture of OpenAI, Japan’s Softbank and Oracle announced an investment of US$500 billion to build data centers and AI infrastructure.
In Europe, French President Macron announced that he would invest 109 billion euros in the next few years to promote the development of artificial intelligence projects.
Related reading: Collection of core information and speeches at the French AI Summit
This benchmarking complements the strategic cooperation with Apple announced not long ago by Alibaba Chairman Cai Chongxin.
Related reading: Apple Intelligence in China may cooperate with Alibaba
The image and status of “AI company Alibaba” in the global perspective have been clarified and recognized.
This status is first of all a verification of technical strength.
For example, Alibaba Cloud’s self-developed Qwen series has achieved full size and full mode open source. The Qwen2.5-Max model has surpassed international top models such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet in many benchmark tests.
Related reading: In addition to DeepSeek, there is also the Qwen 2.5 Max, which is the global killer. Take a look at its PK with o3-mini
More importantly, Alibaba has always been a stickler of the open source belief in AI and a builder of the open source ecosystem, and this belief is reshaping the pattern of China’s AI industry.
Data shows that the cumulative download volume of the open source model “Tongyi Thousand Questions” has exceeded 2 million times, serving more than 90,000 corporate developers, covering eight major industries including finance, manufacturing, and medical care.
This technological spillover effect has made Alibaba’s AI infrastructure attributes more and more prominent-just as Taobao made millions of online merchants back then, today’s AI open source ecosystem is incubating a new generation of technology innovators.
Internally, Alibaba has also built a complete AI ecosystem giant experimental ground.
“In the next three years, Ali will focus on the core of its AI strategy and increase investment in AI infrastructure, basic model platforms and AI native applications, and AI transformation of existing businesses.” Wu Yongming said.
As the most important real position for the AI scenario revolution, Taobao Tmall is providing a realistic footnote for the commercialization of AI and the next leap in e-commerce business.
For example, on the user side, the “Taobao Ask” AI shopping guide assistant is provided, and highly active users interact 8 times a day on average, effectively improving the shopping experience and platform e-commerce conversion rate.
On the merchant side, 10 free AI tools have been launched for merchants, covering a variety of scenarios such as intelligent model map generation, intelligent scene generation, weekly data reports, trend insights, and intelligent optimization of product titles. During the Double Eleven period, merchants called AI tools more than 1.5 billion times, greatly improving the merchants ‘operational efficiency.
In terms of content creation and marketing, the AtomoVideo application has been launched, which supports the automatic conversion of pictures into videos, helping merchants quickly generate creative Short Video.
There are also Ali Mom Bailing intelligent marketing delivery system, AI fitting room, Xiaomi intelligent customer service system, etc., making Taobao Tmall the richest AI training ground.
On the 1688 platform, a large manufacturing enterprise introduced an AI supplier matching system to shorten the supplier screening time from weeks to days. At the same time, procurement costs were reduced by 15%, and the quality pass rate of purchased products was increased by 10%.
While the outside world is still debating the feasibility of AGI, AGI is approaching step by step in these scenarios.
“The primary goal of Alibaba Group’s AI strategy is to achieve AGI, which is defined as AI can achieve more than 80% of human capabilities. So if AGI comes true, the artificial intelligence industry may become the largest industry in the world.” Wu Yongming said.
In the process of industrial AI, rookie’s smart logistics system has also become the best application scenario.
The AI scheduling system deployed in 70 hub-level intelligent warehouses across the country has increased package sorting efficiency by 35%. In 2023, the first delivery time record for Double 11 orders will be refreshed to 4 minutes and 31 seconds.
The more far-reaching impact is that its independently developed logistics model has been opened to the industry, and the capacity utilization rate of the transfer yard has increased by 18% after a certain express delivery company connects.
With the implementation of AI strategy and the recovery of cloud business growth, Alibaba’s valuation model is also changing.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other institutions believe that their valuation is expected to be closer to AWS (Amazon Cloud) and Azure (Microsoft Cloud), enjoying a double premium of ‘cloud + AI’.”
As a result, these institutions have all raised Alibaba’s rating and target price, and predicted that Alibaba Cloud’s revenue boosted by AI will double within three years.
In 2023, Alibaba proposed “All in AI”. Especially since 2025, this strategy is visually entering the fast lane.
At the industrial level, through open source systems, computing power infrastructure and technological empowerment, it is becoming the foundation to support AI innovation in China.
And this company, which will be in business for 102 years, is completing its transformation from an e-commerce platform to a technology company to an AI company.
Like DeepSeek, Alibaba is participating in the center of the global AI arena as the most competitive player in China.
