Alibaba intensifies efforts, the AI super application battle is about to break out in 2025

Author | Liu Baodan

Editor | Huang Yu

Alibaba, which has always favored investing in AI large model startups, has clearly stated that it will not invest in the hot DeepSeek. Behind this, Alibaba has quietly entered the field, increasing its layout in AI To C.

Recently, Wall Street News learned that AI scientist Xu Zhuhong has officially joined Alibaba as Vice President of Alibaba Group, responsible for foundational research and application solutions related to multimodal foundational models and Agents in the AI To C business.

This is the first time Alibaba has disclosed its recruitment of top talent for C-end business, and the significance behind it is self-evident. The competition for AI large models is essentially a competition for talent. Zhang Yiming personally recruited top AI talent, which allowed ByteDance's AI to catch up. Now, with Alibaba bringing in Xu Zhuhong, a leading figure in global multimodal large models, it signifies a shift in Alibaba's AI layout focus.

It is reported that Xu Zhuhong has served as a professor at Nanyang Technological University and Singapore Management University. His published papers on "multimodal pre-training" have ranked among the top five globally in terms of citations that year. His proposed pre-training strategy effectively reduces costs and has influenced the development of AI large models.

The competition in the AI application market is becoming increasingly fierce, and Alibaba is playing a big game targeting the C-end market.

At the end of last year, Alibaba spun off its AI application "Tongyi" from Alibaba Cloud, and the product managers and related engineering teams were incorporated into Alibaba's Intelligent Information Business Group, which was established in 2021 and includes products like Quark, UC Browser, and Shuqi Novel. Internally, the Tongyi and Quark teams are on the same level, and the pattern of Alibaba's two main AI application products is beginning to take shape.

By the end of 2023, Eddie Wu positioned Quark as one of the first strategic innovations, targeting students and young people, with the potential to create revolutionary search products in the era of large models. However, at the beginning of this year, Quark upgraded its brand slogan to "AI all-round assistant for 200 million people."

From a search product to an AI all-round assistant, Quark's strategic importance within Alibaba has significantly increased. With Tongyi incorporated into Alibaba's Intelligent Information Business Group, product-oriented actions will become more frequent.

According to the latest "2024 Annual Strength AI Product List" released by Qimai Data, Quark App's annual download volume exceeded 370 million. According to QuestMobile data, as of September 2024, Tongyi had 3.0885 million monthly active users, ranking 10th among AIGC applications.

In mid-January, Alibaba also handed over the smart interconnection business group where the To C hardware business "Tmall Genie" resides to Wu Jia, the president of the Intelligent Information Business Group, for overall management. Wall Street News learned that the team's focus is on planning and defining the next generation of AI products and integrating them with Quark's AI capabilities.

At this point, Alibaba's core C-end business has been unified, with software applications like Tongyi and Quark, as well as hardware like Tmall Genie, all under Wu Jia's management. His most well-known achievement is the development of the next generation mobile search product Quark. After Eddie Wu took office, he boldly promoted a young management team, including Wu Jia. This time, the product-savvy Wu Jia will charge into the AI application battlefield More than two years have passed since ChatGPT gained global popularity, and the competition for AI large models has shifted to the application end. The changing market situation has forced Alibaba to adjust its AI layout, with the previously marginalized C-end applications coming to the forefront.

Alibaba's AI layout mainly consists of three levels. First, Alibaba Cloud provides computing power services and has a large-scale general-purpose model, which can offer large model services. Second, as the largest e-commerce platform in China, Alibaba views AI as a key driving force to enhance its competitive capabilities, applying it within its own ecological scenarios. Finally, Alibaba has also made extensive external investments.

However, the rise of DeepSeek has completely changed the valuation logic of computing power, with its low cost and high performance prompting the industry to rethink the scale law. Meanwhile, among the unicorn companies invested by Alibaba, the dark side of the moon is embroiled in arbitration disputes, and Lingyi Wanzhi is no longer pursuing the training of super large models. Currently, the fastest-running AI applications are Doubao and DeepSeek.

Alibaba's advantage lies in its capabilities and resource advantages in the AI industry chain, but it lacks experience in creating super products, which is a significant challenge for Alibaba as it intensifies its focus on C-end applications.

In fact, in the early stages of the AI explosion, Alibaba did not prioritize the C-end, closely related to its own developmental genes. As an e-commerce platform, Alibaba is more adept at B-end business. In its past development experiences, Alibaba has also attempted social applications but did not succeed.

The year 2025 will be a crucial year for the application of AI large models. To create super applications in the AI era, Alibaba needs to make unprecedented innovations based on large AI models, which is destined to be a challenging battle, and time is running out for Alibaba