Alibaba founder Jack Ma visits Ant Group campus as fintech giant ramps up AI efforts

Alibaba Group Holding founder Jack Ma on Tuesday made a low-key visit to the Hangzhou campus of Ant Group that coincided with the Chinese fintech giant’s launch of LingGuang, a next-generation multimodal artificial intelligence assistant.\nMa, who had relinquished his control of the fintech company and resigned from all corporate roles at Alibaba, was seen accompanied by Ant Group chairman Eric Jing Xiandong and CEO Cyril Han Xinyi during his tour of the campus. Ant Group is an affiliate of Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post.\nTuesday’s visit marked almost a year since Ma, who is still regarded as the spiritual leader of the Alibaba business empire he created, gave a rare public speech at Ant Group’s 20th anniversary in December, when he touted that “the changes brought by artificial intelligence in the next 20 years will go beyond everyone’s imagination, as AI will bring a greater era”.\nThe 61-year-old Chinese tech billionaire said at the time that Ant Group would continue to use technology to bring “progress and changes” to people’s lives in the next two decades.\nAnt Group on Tuesday unveiled LingGuang, an AI assistant designed to help users create a variety of simple apps in as little as 30 seconds – including a calorie tracker, a Pac-Man-style game and a Chinese character memorisation tool – based on natural language prompts.\nMeanwhile, Alibaba Cloud – the AI and cloud services unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba – this week pushed the beta testing of its consumer AI assistant, Qwen, which some analysts saw as having the potential to become China’s AI-era super app in the same vein that Tencent Holdings’ WeChat defined the mobile internet age.\n\n“Qwen and LingGuang, with their respective strengths, open up new opportunities for Alibaba to dominate the new AI gateway,” said Zhang Yi, founder and chief analyst at internet consultancy iiMedia.\nAccording to He Zhengyu, Ant Group’s chief technology officer, LingGuang brings to everyone’s pocket the expertise of a personal developer – “someone who can code, create visuals, build apps and turn complex ideas into simple solutions”. It could also help users plan their trips, manage their personal finance and guide them when shopping, the company said.\nLingGuang had been downloaded nearly 100,000 times since its launch, according to app analytics service Qimai.\nAlibaba Cloud’s Qwen AI assistant app, meanwhile, was a product for the Chinese market that could go toe to toe with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.\nAccording to veteran Chinese venture capitalist Allen Zhu Xiaohu, the managing director at GSR Ventures, Qwen performed well in handling professional questions with clear logic and a reasoning chain.\n“This is truly the AI product needed by the Chinese market,” Zhu wrote in a post on WeChat. He added that Alibaba appeared to be positioning Qwen into a “super AI gateway”, backed by its computing resource infrastructure, data accumulation and integration of AI into multiple areas.\nIn spite of competition from the likes of ByteDance and Baidu, “Alibaba could leverage its strengths – spanning e-commerce, finance and logistics, among others – to develop an AI-embedded ecosystem as its competitive moat”, iiMedia’s Zhang said.\n