Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai on AI Development

• Developers will think about real-world applications that drive economic impact. This will accelerate the proliferation of task-specific and specialist AI models and agents.
• Capital will go to companies that innovate with lower cost of training and deploying AI.
• Open-source models will lead to the democratization of AI. The result is that smaller companies can access open-source frontier models and develop useful applications on top of them.
• AI applications based on smaller parameter models will proliferate, making AI accessible to a lot more people.
• Making AI less costly and more accessible means more companies and developers can participate in the upside of AI development, and more consumers will benefit from the proliferation of useful and cool applications.

Tsai's advocacy for open innovation reflects Alibaba's ongoing initiatives, including the release of cutting-edge, open-source large language models from its Qwen family testament to the company's long-term commitment to fostering inclusive, accessible, and affordable AI advancements:

• Alibaba was one of the earliest major global tech companies to make its self-developed large-scale AI model in open source, with the launch of ModelScope, its open-source community, in the end of 2022. It released its first open-source model (Qwen-7B) in August 2023, with subsequent iterations encompassing language, multi-modal, mathematical, and code models.
• Last month, Alibaba released its next-generation multi-modal model Qwen2.5-VL and the latest large language model Qwen2.5-1M in open-source format, both delivering top results across globally recognized benchmarks.
• As of February 2025, over 90,000 Qwen-based derivative models have been developed in the global open-source community Hugging Face. This reflects Qwen's popularity as one of the world's most widely adopted open-source models.