Last year, the titans of China’s technology industry received a rare invitation to meet with Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, in the ceremonial Great Hall of the People.
But when the entrepreneurs — including the heads of national stars like the telecommunications giant Huawei and rising companies like the robotics start-up Unitree — assembled in neat rows before Mr. Xi, an unexpected figure was among them: Jack Ma.
Mr. Ma, who founded the Alibaba e-commerce empire in a cramped Hangzhou apartment and became a rock star of China’s internet era, had all but vanished from public view since Beijing torpedoed the planned $34 billion public offering of one of his companies after he criticized regulators in 2020.
Now, however, Alibaba has re-emerged as an A.I. powerhouse, creating one of the world’s most widely used A.I. systems.
Alibaba made its most popular A.I. models open source, allowing others to use and modify them freely. That made its technology much cheaper to use than proprietary systems from U.S. competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI, helping the company attract users around the world.
But it also raised a difficult question — how to turn that global popularity into a profitable business. It’s a challenge that many companies with open-source technologies face and one that is dividing Alibaba’s A.I. team.
