Vincent Chow
When Alibaba Group Holding’s CEO Eddie Wu Yongming took the stage at the company’s annual Apsara conference in Hangzhou on September 24, few people expected the media-shy executive to deliver anything shocking, especially since he read from prepared statements at last year’s event.
Wu, however, immediately outlined a clear road map for Alibaba’s AI development, with a goal towards so-called artificial superintelligence (ASI) – when the firm’s Qwen open-source models and cloud services would serve as the software and computing infrastructure of the future.
In essence, Alibaba aimed to become the “world’s leading full-stack AI service provider”, he said. Alibaba owns the Post.
The blueprint laid out in Wu’s 23-minute speech signified not just a strategic upgrade for Alibaba, but also highlighted the competition between Chinese and US tech giants for the future of artificial intelligence – a field that has drawn some of the largest investments in history, with profound economic, social and geopolitical implications.
As he spoke, Alibaba’s shares surged to a four-year high in Hong Kong, leading several banks to raise their price targets for the stock.
A day later, US chipmaker Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang referenced Wu’s remarks during a podcast with tech investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley, in which he underscored the importance of spending big on AI.
When asked about Nvidia’s US$100 billion investment in OpenAI, Huang predicted that the ChatGPT maker could become a “multi-trillion-dollar hyperscale company” on the back of its rapidly expanding array of products.
The AI arena has now shifted from just large language models to include upstream hardware and downstream applications, according to Kyle Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University.
No comments:
Post a Comment