阿里巴巴的人工智能大獲成功，但難以轉化為獲利模式（1/2）

Recently The New York Times reported the following:

Alibaba’s A.I. Is a Hit, but Hard to Turn into a Moneymaker (1/2)

The Chinese company’s models have won over developers worldwide, but they are open source — so they can be used and modified freely.

By Meaghan Tobin and Xinyun Wu - Reporting from Taipei, Taiwan

July 6, 2026, 12:05 p.m. ET

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 telecommunications giant Huawei and rising companies like the 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 $34 billion public offering of one of his companies after he criticized regulators in 2020.

Now, however, Alibaba has re-emerged 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 that 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 outmaneuvered by lower-cost rivals at home and has struggled to expand overseas. After Mr. Ma faded from public view, a new generation of executives took over, adopting a lower profile while emphasizing Alibaba’s role within 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. “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 Western competitors, global investors rushed to capitalize on the excitement around China’s open-source A.I.

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.

By January, Qwen had become the world’s most 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.

But that reach has not translated into big money. In the first three months of this year, Alibaba reported $1.3 billion in revenue from A.I.-related products — less than 4 percent of its total revenue. That pales in comparison with the company’s plan to spend more than $55 billion by the end of next year to build out its A.I. infrastructure.

The push to turn its open-source success into a profitable business has quietly fractured the team behind Qwen.

(to be continued)

Translation

阿里巴巴的人工智能大獲成功，但難以轉化為獲利模式（1/2）

這家中國公司的模型贏得了全球開發者的青睞，但它們是開源的 - 因此可以自由使用和修改

去年，中國科技業的巨頭們獲得了一次難得的機會，在人民大會堂與國家領導人習近平會面。

但當這些企業家 - 包括國家之星華為等電信巨頭和Unitree等新興公司的負責人 - 整齊地列隊站在習近平主席面前時，一個意想不到的人物赫然出現在他們中間：馬雲。

馬雲先生在杭州一間狹小的公寓裡創立了阿里巴巴電商帝國，並成為中國網路時代的耀眼人物。然而，自從2020年他批評監管機構後，北京方面叫停了他旗下公司340億美元的IPO計劃，此後他幾乎從公眾視野中消失。

如今，阿里巴巴以人工智能巨頭的身份重返大眾視野，打造了全球應用最廣泛的人工智能系統之一。

阿里巴巴將其最受歡迎的人工智能模型開源，允許其他人自由使用和修改。這使得其技術的成本遠低於美國競爭對手（如Anthropic和OpenAI）的專有系統，幫助公司吸引了全球用戶。

但這同時也引發了一個難題 - 如何將這種全球影響力轉化為獲利業務。這是許多擁有開源技術的公司面臨的挑戰，也是阿里巴巴人工智能團隊內部的分歧所在。

阿里巴巴憑藉著遍佈全球的電子商務業務，一躍成為中國市值最高的公司之一。但近年來，它在國內市場被成本較低的競爭對手超越，海外擴張也舉步維艱。馬雲淡出公眾視野後，新一代主管接手公司，行事低調，同時強調阿里巴巴在北京更廣泛的科技政策中扮演的角色。

布魯金斯學會研究員Kyle Chan表示：“阿里巴巴非常清楚自身是這支引領中國人工智能發展的國家冠軍團隊的一員。但他們亦肩負著巨大的責任而不能重蹈覆轍。”

回首往事，阿里巴巴其實早已為成為人工智能巨頭奠定了基礎。隨著其線上購物和物流業務的擴張，該公司在全球範圍內建立了能夠處理海量客戶資料的資料中心。

阿里巴巴也藉鑒了亞馬遜的成功經驗，將其電商成功和技術基礎設施轉化為強大的雲端運算業務，從而擁有建構人工智能系統的兩大關鍵要素：數據和運算能力。

Chan先生說:“阿里巴巴在很多方面都走在了時代的前端”，“它早期下注的許多前端領域如今已是熱門項目。”

阿里巴巴於2023年推出了其人工智能模型系列Qwen，並迅速將其開源。當人工智能初創公司DeepSeek聲稱其以遠低於西方競爭對手的成本構建了一個強大的模型時，全球投資者蜂擁而至，爭相從中國開源人工智能的熱潮中獲利。

中國已將開源技術作為其邁向人工智能超級大國的重要支柱。幾乎所有領先的人工智能系統都是開源的。

今年1月，Qwen已成為全球下載量最高的開源人工智能系統。根據託管眾多開源人工智能專案的 Hugging Face 資料顯示，其模型每天的下載量約為一百萬次。

但這種影響力並未轉化為豐厚的利潤。今年前三個月，阿里巴巴公佈的人工智能相關產品收入為 13 億美元，不到總收入的 4%。與該公司計劃在明年年底前投入超過 550 億美元用於建立人工智能基礎設施相比，這一數字顯得微不足道。

將開源的成功轉化為盈利業務的努力，悄悄導致了 Qwen 團隊的分裂。

（待續）