Eddie Wu pointed out Alibaba's new direction in AI

Author | Liu Baodan

Editor | Huang Yu

As the second-in-command of Alibaba Group, second only to Joseph Tsai, Eddie Wu has always been very low-key, and the few opportunities he has had to appear have been dedicated to AI.

On November 20, the 2024 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit officially opened, and Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu stated at the plenary session that the main value of the internet over the past 30 years has been connectivity, while in the next 30 years, AI will comprehensively enhance the productivity level of the entire world, creating value far beyond what internet connectivity has created.

Two months ago, at the Yunqi Conference, Eddie Wu had already stated that the greatest imagination of generative AI is not to create one or two new super apps on a mobile screen, but to take over the digital world and change the physical world.

To this end, Alibaba has long been strategically prepared for an ALL IN AI approach. In November last year, Eddie Wu participated in the quarterly earnings analyst conference as Alibaba Group CEO for the first time, fully explaining the strategic blueprint for Alibaba's new development stage.

He judged that the driving force for industry development in the future will be the technological driving force represented by AI, and Alibaba will have three important priority directions for the future: technology-driven internet platform business, AI-driven technology business, and global commercial network.

For AI, Alibaba is making a bold bet. Eddie Wu stated, "Alibaba will maintain an entrepreneurial mindset and seize the new opportunities brought by the AI technological revolution."

Currently, AI is gradually penetrating various industries, helping to enhance industrial capabilities and driving a productivity revolution, with Alibaba playing the role of "infrastructure" and being an important participant in the AI industry.

In the previous stage, enterprises "moved to the cloud," pressing the fast-forward button for the industrial internet, driving agile innovation and business growth through data. Today, 80% of China's technology companies, 65% of specialized and innovative "little giant" companies, and 60% of A-share listed companies are running on Alibaba Cloud.

In the new stage, Eddie Wu believes that AI, with its continuously evolving general intelligence, will drive various industries from digitalization to intelligence, more powerfully enhancing productivity levels. "As AI moves from the digital world into the physical world, most things in the future will possess AI capabilities, achieving a natural integration of 'digital' and 'real'."

Facing the AI era, Eddie Wu stated that Alibaba focuses on doing two things well: first, continuously improving AI infrastructure and related support systems; second, adhering to open-source and openness, working with a wide range of ecological partners to transform AI capabilities into productivity across various industries.

Eddie Wu revealed that over the past year, Alibaba has made high-intensity investments in AI infrastructure construction, and based on scale effects and technological advancements, computing power costs have continued to decrease.

For example, the API call price for "Tongyi Qianwen" has dropped by 97% in a year, with the cost of one million tokens now as low as 0.5 yuan. He believes, "Just as sufficiently cheap electricity led to the explosive growth of the electrification era, sufficiently cheap computing power will ultimately bring us into the intelligent era." Eddie Wu stated that Alibaba insists on open-sourcing the latest and most comprehensive self-developed large models to the entire industry, promoting the creation of a prosperous AI ecosystem.

As of now, global developers have created over 78,000 derivative models based on Alibaba's "Tongyi Qianwen," and more than 8 million users have downloaded models and applied them through Alibaba's AI model community "Mota." The open-sourcing of models has greatly lowered the threshold for various industries to develop and use AI, promoting the application of AI in rich scenarios.

Eddie Wu believes that the richness of scenarios and the activity of applications are important reasons for the remarkable achievements of China's internet in the previous stage that attracted global attention; in the AI era, this advantage of scenarios and applications is expected to continue