Alibaba once rose over 8%, AI sector measures stimulate investor enthusiasm

Today, after the Hong Kong stock market opened, Alibaba's stock price once rose to HKD 113.900, up more than 8%, before retreating. As of the time of writing, it is up 7.91%, at HKD 113.2.

From the beginning of the year to now, Alibaba's stock price has overall risen by about 27%. In 2024, after completing a leadership change and investing a total of USD 16 billion (approximately RMB 116.8 billion) in share buybacks within the year, Alibaba's stock price increased by 10%. In 2021, 2022, and 2023, Alibaba's stock prices fell by approximately 48%, 19%, and 11%, respectively.

Industry analysts believe that Alibaba's recent release of new AI models, the integration of DeepSeek into Alibaba Cloud, and last night's news from insiders that Apple and Alibaba will collaborate on developing AI features have all contributed to the rise in Alibaba's stock price in Hong Kong.

Jack Ma reappears at Alibaba campus, says AI will change everything

On December 8, 2024, Jack Ma appeared at the Ant Group's 20th anniversary event and emphasized the development of AI. He stated, "From today’s perspective, the changes brought by the AI era in the next 20 years will exceed everyone’s imagination," because AI will be a greater era. "AI will change everything, but that does not mean AI can decide everything. Technology is certainly important, but what will truly determine the outcome in the future is what we do today that is genuinely valuable and different for this upcoming era," Jack Ma added.

Yesterday, Jack Ma appeared at the Alibaba campus, as shown in the picture of him communicating with employees in the Alibaba Intelligent Information Business Group where Quark is located.

Recently, Alibaba has been actively laying out its AI To C business, with the Alibaba Intelligent Information Business Group taking on the responsibility for Alibaba's AI applications on the consumer side. Previously, Alibaba's AI application "Tongyi" was merged into the Alibaba Intelligent Information Business Group, becoming one of the two consumer brands developed alongside Quark. This month, top global AI scientist and former Salesforce Group Vice President Xu Zhuhong was appointed Vice President of Alibaba Group, responsible for multimodal foundational models and Agents-related basic research and application solutions for AI To C business.

In terms of foundational large models, the technological progress of Alibaba's Tongyi large model has attracted market attention. On the first day of the Lunar New Year, Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Qianwen flagship model Qwen2.5-Max was released. In the Chatbot Arena LLM Leaderboard, Qwen2.5-Max ranked seventh globally with a score of 1332, surpassing models like DeepSeek V3, o1-mini, and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. At the same time, Qwen2.5-Max ranked first in mathematics and programming, and second in Hard prompts Recently, research teams from Stanford and Berkeley have fine-tuned Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 large model to replicate the DeepSeek-R1 model at a low cost. Among them, Professor Fei-Fei Li's team at Stanford University utilized Alibaba's open-source Qwen 2.5 model to train a new inference model with cloud computing costs of less than $50. Meanwhile, the team led by Pan Jiayi at the University of California, Berkeley, replicated the core functions of DeepSeek R1-Zero at a low cost of $30.

It is worth mentioning that DeepSeek has also chosen Tongyi Qianwen as its foundational model. It is reported that DeepSeek distilled DeepSeek-R1 into six open-source models, four of which are based on the Qwen series. Notably, the model distilled from Qwen-32B has achieved performance comparable to OpenAI's o1-mini.

DeepSeek has also brought new opportunities for cloud infrastructure to Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba Cloud has fully launched six full-size DeepSeek models on its Bai Lian platform.

American Hedge Fund Tycoons Continue to Increase Holdings

Alex Au, General Manager of Alphalex Capital Management Fund in Hong Kong, stated that DeepSeek has significantly rekindled international investors' interest in Chinese technology and should help narrow the valuation gap. Just a few days after the release of DeepSeek, Alibaba announced its latest AI model, claiming to have achieved better results, and Alibaba Cloud integrated the DeepSeek model, which drove up Alibaba's Hong Kong stock price. Alex Au emphasized that cloud service providers like Alibaba will be one of the main beneficiaries of this DeepSeek boom.

On Monday, billionaire investor David Tepper's Appaloosa LP submitted a 13-F filing to the U.S. SEC, showing that in the fourth quarter of last year, the hedge fund significantly increased its holdings in Chinese stocks and Chinese stock ETFs.

Among them, Appaloosa's holdings in Alibaba increased by 18% to 11.8 million shares, currently valued at over $1.2 billion. As of the end of last year, Alibaba remained its largest holding, accounting for 15.4% of its $6.7 billion investment portfolio.

Additionally, JD.com's holdings increased from approximately 7.3 million shares to about 10.5 million shares, a rise of about 43%, valued at over $400 million at current stock prices. Pinduoduo's holdings increased by about 55,000 shares to 5.4 million shares, an increase of about 1%. As of the end of last year, Pinduoduo was Appaloosa's third-largest holding, accounting for about 8.04% of its investment portfolio. The holdings in Beike Holdings increased from approximately 2.18 million shares to about 2.57 million shares.

In September of last year, Tepper called for "buying everything" related to Chinese assets, causing a sensation. The report released this time shows that he has fulfilled his commitment