Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai says US-China AI competition is not ‘winner takes all’

Xinmei Shen

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China-US competition in artificial intelligence should not be viewed as a winner-takes-all race; rather, it is a marathon where the technology is adopted in different ways in work and life, according to Joe Tsai, the chairman of Alibaba Group Holding.

“When it comes to AI, there’s no such thing as winning the race. I think it’s a long marathon,” Tsai, also chairman of the South China Morning Post, said at an event hosted by the American podcast All-In last month. The video and audio of the event were published on Wednesday. Alibaba owns the Post.

Tsai said the winner in AI should not be defined as “who comes up with the strongest AI model”, but on “who can adopt it faster”. China’s path of developing cost-effective open-source AI models was “conducive to faster adoption” compared with the US approach of pouring tens of billions of dollars into developing trillion-parameter models, according to Tsai.

“I’m not saying China technologically is winning the model war, but in terms of the actual application and also people benefiting from AI, it has made a lot of development,” Tsai said. He cited a survey that showed the percentage of Chinese businesses using AI had increased to 50 per cent this year from 8 per cent last year.

His comments come as American and Chinese tech giants are spending huge amounts on AI infrastructure and computing resources.

Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu Yongming said last month that the Hangzhou-based company plans to increase its capital expenditure on AI infrastructure from the original 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) over the next three years, as it aims to become “the world’s leading full-stack AI service provider”.

The popular All-In podcast, hosted by US tech industry veterans, has US competition with China as a recurring theme. Tsai, one of Alibaba’s co-founders alongside Jack Ma, said he disagrees with the narrative that the US and China are heading towards existential rivalry.

Meanwhile, Tsai said that the adoption of AI had boosted efficiency at Alibaba, with about 30 per cent of the code written within the conglomerate being done by AI.