Headline, August 09 2026/ ''' ALIBABA'S A.I. ALMANAC '''

''' ALIBABA'S A.I. ALMANAC '''

CHINA HAS MADE -OPEN-SOURCE technology a pillar of its drive to become an A.I. superpower. Nearly all of its leading A.I. systems are open-source.

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 telecommunication giant Huawei and rising companies like 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 $14 public offering of one of the companies after he criticized regulators in 2020.

Now, however, Alibaba has reemerged 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 the 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.

Alibaba became one of China's most valuable companies on the strength of its globe-spanning e-commerce business. But in recent years, it has been out-maneuvered by lower-cost rivals at home and has struggled to expand overseas.

After Mr. Ma faded from the public view, a new generation of executives took over adopting a lower profile while emphasising Alibaba's role with Beijing's broader technology policies.

'' Alibaba is quite aware of its position as part of this team of national champions that are leading China's charge in A.I.,'' said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.

'' But also they have this huge responsibility to not repeat what they did before.''

In hindsight, Alibaba had gradually laid the groundwork to become an A.I. heavyweight. As its online shopping and logistics businesses expanded, the company built data centers capable of processing vast volumes of customer data worldwide.

It also borrowed a page from Amazon, parlaying its e-commerce success and technological infrastructure into a major cloud computing business, giving Alibaba two essential ingredients for building artificial intelligence systems: data and computing power.

'' Alibaba in many ways has been ahead of its time,'' Mr. Chan said. '' It made early bets in a lot of these areas that are now the hot topics.''

Alibaba introduced its family of A.I. models, QWen, in 2023 and quickly made them open source.

When DeepSeek, an A.I. start-up, burst into the spotlight with claims that it had built a powerful model for a small fraction of the cost of the Western competitors, global investors rushed to capitalize on the excitement around China's open-source A.I.

By January, Qwen had become the world's largest downloaded open-source A.I. system. Its models were being downloaded about one-million times a day: according to data from Hugging Face which hosts many open-source A.I. projects.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on A.I. systems. developers, and the market, continues. !WOW! thanks Meaghan Tobin and Xinyun Wu.

With most respectful dedication to all A.I. developers in the world, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

See You all prepare for the great '' Constitutional Democratic Conventions '' on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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