On the morning of November 8th, the 2023 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit opened in Wuzhen, Tongxiang, Zhejiang. Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming, speaking on behalf of leading companies at a plenary meeting, proposed that "in the AI era, Alibaba should become an open technology platform enterprise that serves AI innovation in the whole society." This is his first positioning of Alibaba since taking office as CEO on September 10, and also the first time that the domestic internet industry has proposed the development direction of "technology platform enterprise".
First tuning - Alibaba wants to become an open technology platform enterprise
On September 10th of this year, Alibaba underwent a management reshuffle, with Wu Yongming serving as the CEO of Alibaba Holdings Group and continuing to serve as the Chairman of Taotian Group, as well as the Acting Chairman and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group.
Prior to this appointment, Wu Yongming served as the chief technology officer of several important businesses such as B2B, Taobao, Alipay, and led the construction of the underlying technical architecture of related businesses; Led the creation of the group's core business Alibaba Mama platform, innovatively incubated mobile Taobao, and promoted the group's wirelessness. His profound technical background has also become a key driving force behind his leadership of the two most important business lines of Alibaba Group, Taotian and Alibaba Cloud.
The concept of "technology platform enterprise" was proposed on November 8th, marking the first time that Wu Yongming has set the tone for Alibaba. Wu Yongming said that facing the AI era, Alibaba aims to become an open technology platform enterprise that serves AI innovation throughout society.
Looking back on these 20 years, we have created digital business infrastructure services that cover transactions, logistics, payment, production, and other aspects, providing strong support for the development of the e-commerce industry. With AI becoming the key to China's digital economy innovation and breakthrough, Alibaba aims to become an open science and technology platform enterprise, providing infrastructure for AI innovation and transformation in a thousand industries, "said Wu Yongming.
In fact, this tone has already been traced. On September 12th, Wu Yongming released his first full staff letter, announcing the establishment of two strategic priorities: user first and AI driven. On this basis, Alibaba will increase strategic investment in three types of businesses - the first is technology driven internet platform business, the second is AI driven technology business, and the third is a global business network. Among them, "technology" and "platform" have become two major keywords.
Wu Yongming also made it clear that he wants to seek the widest range of openness and cooperation, including companies with traditional competitive relationships. Correspondingly, Alibaba Group will make business cooperation more market-oriented without affecting the strategic linkage effect.
The era of intelligence has just begun
Wu Yongming believes that the era of intelligence has just begun, and all changes are in a very early stage. We believe that there are more unknowns than we know about the future of AI, and more unimaginable than predictable, "he admitted." Everything is possible "contains huge development opportunities.
Coming to Wuzhen this year, I believe many of us have a consensus that AI technology, represented by large models, is rapidly developing and deeply reconstructing the digital and real world. As professionals in the technology industry, we see a very important trend today: the paradigm of computing is undergoing fundamental changes, and the importance of AI computing is surpassing traditional computing and becoming the cornerstone of the digital world. AI computing will eventually become the foundation of the digital world Take over all computing resources from traditional computing He believes that, Traditional computing based on CPU needs to work under the algorithm logic preset by engineers, more like our cerebellum. AI computing with GPU as the core and large model driven has the intelligence to understand human language and object logic, more like our brain. We judge (AI computing) In the future, it will surpass programmers, directly understand user needs, and schedule corresponding resources to actively adapt or create systems. Based on this exciting trend, everyone has their own imagination and expectations for the world of the AI era. Some may sound unreachable, but others are becoming reality
Wu Yongming's prediction: In the foreseeable future, all the product forms we are accustomed to in our lives will undergo changes, and more intelligent next-generation products will enter our lives. More small and medium-sized enterprises will use AI collaboration to flexibly replace some of the services currently only provided by large enterprises. The organizational and collaborative methods of production, manufacturing, and circulation will also undergo fundamental changes. AI assistants will be everywhere, becoming everyone's work and life Assistants in learning. Every enterprise will also be equipped with AI assistants, just like our smart cars today, assisted driving and autonomous driving have become standard equipment
What will Alibaba do in the future?
