Tag: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd

This Is How America Trounces China in the A.I. Race

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The Chinese government has spent three years giving away its most capable artificial intelligence to anyone to use. That generosity was always temporary. Chinese authorities have reportedly been meeting with Alibaba, ByteDance and the start-up Z.ai to discuss restricting overseas access to some of China’s most advanced models — including systems that have not yet been released. The U.S. government’s instinct will likely be to answer with a ban of its own. That would be a mistake. The right response is the opposite: America and its allies should build and…

Alibaba’s A.I. Is a Hit, but Hard to Turn Into a Moneymaker

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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,…

Why A.I. Distillation Has Become a Hot Topic in the Race with China

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The American companies building artificial intelligence systems are loudly complaining that their Chinese competitors are unfairly copying their technology, and they are pleading with officials to do something about it. On June 10, Anthropic sent a letter to Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, accusing the Chinese tech giant Alibaba of surreptitiously copying its A.I. technologies using a technique called distillation. Like other Chinese companies, Alibaba tapped into Anthropic’s technologies through tens of thousands of unauthorized accounts, according to the letter, which was viewed by The New York Times. Then…

The Real A.I. Race Isn’t America vs. China

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A globally recognizable tech executive, high-spirited from preparing for a public offering, offers imprudent remarks criticizing the government. The state strikes back harder than anyone expects. Overnight, the bargain between a skyrocketing sector of the economy and the government is shattered. If you think this story could be about Anthropic, you’re only half right. In 2020, the Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma found himself in the doghouse after he publicly rebuked Chinese regulators. Citing regulatory concerns, the authorities canceled the public offering of Ant Group, another company Mr. Ma helped found,…

Alibaba Sues Pentagon Over China Military Label

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Alibaba, one of China’s most valuable technology companies, sued the U.S. Department of Defense, challenging the Pentagon’s decision to designate it as a company affiliated with the Chinese military. Best known internationally for its e-commerce business, Alibaba has also become a major cloud-computing provider and one of China’s leading developers of advanced artificial intelligence systems. In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Federal District Court in the Northern District of California, the company said it had no ties to the Chinese military and argued that the Pentagon had acted unlawfully…

DeepSeek’s Sequel Set to Extend China’s Reach in Open-Source A.I.

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When the Chinese start-up DeepSeek published details about one of its artificial intelligence models last year, it sent shock waves through the tech industry. The company said it had built its system by spending far less on computer chips than American rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. It marked the start of what became known as China’s “DeepSeek moment,” shorthand for the belief that Chinese A.I. companies were ready to showcase their technical capabilities to the world. The DeepSeek moment reflected a shift in the global A.I. landscape. The change was…

China’s Rush to Dominate A.I. Comes With a Twist: It Depends on U.S. Technology

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In November, a year after ChatGPT’s release, a relatively unknown Chinese start-up leaped to the top of a leaderboard that judged the abilities of open-source artificial intelligence systems. The Chinese firm, 01.AI, was only eight months old but had deep-pocketed backers and a $1 billion valuation and was founded by a well-known investor and technologist, Kai-Fu Lee. In interviews, Mr. Lee presented his A.I. system as an alternative to options like Meta’s generative A.I. model, called LLaMA. There was just one twist: Some of the technology in 01.AI’s system came…

China’s Investors Are Losing Faith in Its Markets and Economy

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Like many Chinese people, Jacky hoped that he could make enough money investing in China’s stock markets to help pay for an apartment in a big city. But in 2015 he lost $30,000, and in 2021 he lost $80,000. After that, he shut down his trading account and started investing in Chinese funds that track stocks in the United States. It’s a perilous time for investors in China. Their main vehicle, so-called A shares of Chinese companies, fell more than 11 percent in 2023 and have continued their losses this…

Jack Ma Doubles Down on Alibaba

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Tsai has bought about $151 million worth of Alibaba’s U.S.-traded shares in the fourth quarter, via his Blue Pool Management family investment vehicle, a securities filing confirmed on Tuesday. Ma, who stepped down as the company’s executive chairman in 2019 but remains a major shareholder, bought $50 million worth of Hong Kong-traded stock in the quarter, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. (Both men already hold sizable amounts of Alibaba stock.) The purchase sizes aren’t huge — Alibaba’s market capitalization is about $171 billion — but given…

Daniel Zhang Steps Down From Alibaba

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Daniel Zhang, the departing chief executive and chairman of the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, has stepped down as head of the tech company’s cloud division, a position he held for mere months. The company announced in June that Mr. Zhang, would give up the chairman role this month to Joseph Tsai, a co-founder of Alibaba, and that Eddie Yongming Wu, another founder, would became the chief executive. But Mr. Zhang had been widely expected to continue to lead Alibaba’s cloud computing division, a position he assumed in March as part…