How Alibaba Helped China Take the Lead From the U.S. in Open-Source AI

From left: Eddie Wu, Jack Ma and Zhou Jingren. Photos by Getty

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When Alibaba Group’s cloud business unit announced the first generation of artificial intelligence models developed by its own team in 2023, the Chinese tech giant said in a statement that it would integrate the models, known as Qwen, into its various businesses “in the near future.”

The reality wasn’t so simple. Each of the company’s six business units—including its cash-cow China e-commerce business and its online entertainment services unit—was making its own technology-buying decisions. And some teams building AI applications were so unimpressed by Qwen’s capabilities that they kept using other companies’ AI models, such as Meta Platforms’ Llama, well into 2024, according to employees with knowledge of the matter. More recently, some Alibaba apps chose to use DeepSeek’s R1 to power their AI features.