Joseph Tsai: The artificial intelligence competition is not a winner-takes-all; it is a "long marathon."

On October 9th, the well-known podcast All-in released the video and audio from its All-in Summit. At this event, Joseph Tsai, Chairman of Alibaba Group, stated that the artificial intelligence competition is not a winner-takes-all scenario, but rather a "long marathon," where one model may be leading this week, but another model will surpass it next week.

During the event, Joseph Tsai engaged in a debate with David Sacks, the White House's head of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency affairs. David believes that it is crucial for the U.S. to win the AI competition.

Joseph Tsai expressed that his definition of "winning" is not about who launches the most powerful AI model, but rather who can adopt it faster. A significant amount of resources in the U.S. should be invested in technology application and promotion, rather than just funding technology. Large-scale companies invest about $80 billion annually, but in China, several things are happening: first, China has embraced open source; second, many companies, including Alibaba, have launched smaller models instead of trillion-parameter models.

Joseph Tsai believes that if we want to see AI become widespread, we can look at current developments in China. "I am not saying that China is technically winning the model war, but in terms of practical applications and beneficiaries, AI has made significant progress. Surveys show that last year, only 8% of companies used AI in their operations, and now that percentage is approaching 50%."

In the interview, the host asked whether the workforce would naturally decrease as more workloads are handled by AI.

In response, Joseph Tsai said, "We have not announced any layoffs due to AI. I have been asking our engineering leaders how much code is currently written by AI. The answers vary depending on which department you ask, but I believe it may have reached around 30%."

Joseph Tsai mentioned that when he became Chairman of Alibaba, he emphasized that Alibaba is engaged in two main businesses: e-commerce and cloud computing, which include elements of AI. "Describing our company as being in six different business areas (Alibaba once divided into six business groups) is too confusing."

In the interview, Joseph Tsai also discussed that Alibaba, established 26 years ago, experienced a completely free-market growth model in its first 15 years, and then entered a phase of intense competition, where everyone wanted to engage in e-commerce because it was the best way to monetize traffic. In today's market, Alibaba faces five or six strong competitors, including ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. "Having gone through a period of intense competition, the government believes that this industry has become somewhat uncontrollable. Some platforms have exhibited monopolistic behavior, leading to more regulatory measures being introduced, and we have entered a new normal. We believe the regulatory environment is more predictable. We know where the red lines are, and we know where to go and where not to go. In fact, due to its predictability, it has created a better operating environment." It is reported that Alibaba's bets on e-commerce and artificial intelligence have led to its stock prices in both the US and Hong Kong rising by over 110% so far this year, making it one of the best-performing tech stocks.

Last month, Alibaba Group CEO and Chairman of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group Eddie Wu emphasized that Alibaba would increase its investments beyond the 380 billion yuan announced in February this year for the next three years. In addition, Alibaba's AI strategy has become clearer and more aggressive: as a "full-stack AI service provider," it collaborates with numerous partners to build a complete ecosystem from underlying chips to upper-layer model applications.

The Paper, Author: Wu Yuxin, Original Title: "Joseph Tsai: The AI Race is Not a Winner-Takes-All, It's a 'Long Marathon'."

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