阿里巴巴的人工智能大獲成功，但難以轉化為獲利模式（2/2）

Recently The New York Times reported the following:

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

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

(continue)

In March, Lin Junyang, Qwen’s lead engineer, announced that he was leaving Alibaba. Several other key engineers left around the same time. Two people familiar with the team said it had become divided by disagreements over how best to commercialize Qwen.

Alibaba had long kept its largest, most advanced models proprietary, while releasing leading open-source models alongside them. Now, the company is signaling a broader shift away from widely used open-source models and toward closed ones that customers must pay to use. In April alone, Alibaba released three proprietary models within days of one another.

The Qwen team remains focused on keeping pace with the leading models coming out of Silicon Valley, but there is a growing recognition that technological leadership will not be enough if the company doesn’t make money, said a member of Alibaba’s A.I. research lab, which includes the Qwen team and others, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss internal matters.

The challenge for Alibaba is apparent in its stock price. While A.I.-related stocks have surged in markets worldwide, Alibaba’s stock has fallen 37 percent this year in Hong Kong, where the broader market has declined 12 percent.

Building a top-performing A.I. model is expensive, requiring enormous investments in hangar-size data centers filled with computer chips that consume copious amounts of electricity.

Chinese A.I. companies face an additional hurdle: U.S. export controls limit their access to the most advanced chips. China’s leading A.I. start-ups and researchers routinely say shortages of computing power are the biggest thing holding them back, and they are spending heavily to secure it.

Those exorbitant costs are heaping financial pressure on Chinese A.I. companies. Start-ups like MiniMax and Z.ai have gone public to raise money from investors, and Alibaba is increasingly steering customers toward proprietary models even if that strategy upsets some of its top talent.

“It is a tough choice to make, and one that every open-model lab has to make at some point,” said Kevin Xu, the founder of Interconnected Capital, a hedge fund that invests in A.I. technologies.

Alibaba’s A.I. business faces mounting external challenges. The Pentagon recently placed the company on a blacklist of firms that it says support the Chinese military, a designation that Alibaba argues has already harmed its business. In a statement, Alibaba said it was not affiliated with the Chinese military.

Anthropic and OpenAI have also accused Chinese companies, including Alibaba, of improperly harvesting data from their A.I. systems to accelerate the development of their models.

Last month, Anthropic sent a letter to Senators Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, accusing Alibaba of “brazenly” and “illicitly” trying to copy its technology using 24,000 fraudulent accounts. Alibaba declined to comment on the allegations.

Many in the technology industry compare today’s A.I. boom to the early days of the dot-com era, when internet companies were flourishing but no one had yet figured out how to build durable businesses around the technology.

Richard Lin, a vice president at the Silicon Valley company Datastrato who has long been involved in China’s open-source community, said China’s leading A.I. companies were all fighting for survival.

“There isn’t an A.I. company with a sustainable business model right now,” he said. “It’s not a healthy industry.”

Translation

阿里巴巴的人工智能大獲成功，但難以轉化為獲利模式（2/2）

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

（繼續）

今年3月，Qwen首席工程師 Lin Junyang 宣佈離開阿里巴巴。其他幾位關鍵工程師也在同一時間離職。兩位知情人士透露，團隊內部因如何更好地將 Qwen 商業化而產生分歧。

長期以來，阿里巴巴一直將其最大規模、最先進的模型設為專有模型，同時開放一些領先的開源模型。如今，該公司正發出信號，表明其正在從廣泛使用的開源模型轉向客戶必須付費使用的封閉模型。光是在4月份，阿里巴巴就在幾天之內發佈了三個專有模型。

阿里巴巴人工智能研究實驗室的一位成員表示，Qwen團隊仍然專注於去跟上矽谷的領先模式的步伐，但人們越來越意識到，如果公司無法獲利，僅僅擁有技術領先地位是不夠的。這位成員因未獲授權討論內部事務而要求匿名。

阿里巴巴面臨的挑戰在股價上顯而易見。儘管全球人工智能相關股票市場普遍上漲，但阿里巴巴的股價今年在香港已下跌37%，而香港整體股市也下跌了12%。

建構一個性能卓越的人工智能模型成本高昂，需要巨額投資建設飛機庫般大的數據中心，這些數據中心堆滿了耗電量龐大的電腦晶片。

中國的人工智能公司也面臨另一個障礙：美國的出口管制限制了它們取得最先進晶片的管道。中國領先的人工智能初創公司和研究人員經常表示，運算能力短缺是限制他們發展的最大障礙，他們為此正在大量花錢來獲得它。

這些高昂的成本給中國的人工智能公司帶來了巨大的財務壓力。像MiniMax和Z.ai這樣的初創公司已經上市，從投資者那裡籌集資金，而阿里巴巴也越來越多地引導客戶使用其專有模型，即使這種策略會讓一些頂尖人才感到不滿。

投資人工智能技術的對沖基金 Interconnected Capital 的創始人 Kevin Xu 表示:「這是一個艱難的選擇，也是每個開放模型實驗室遲早都必須面對的選擇」。

阿里巴巴的人工智能業務面臨日益嚴峻的外部挑戰。五角大廈最近將該公司列入黑名單，稱其支持中國軍方，阿里巴巴認為這項認定已經對其業務造成了損害。阿里巴巴在聲明中表示，它與中國軍方沒有任何關聯。

Anthropic 和 OpenAI 也指責包括阿里巴巴在內的中國公司不正當地收集其人工智能資料以加速開發其模型系統。

上個月，Anthropic公司致函南卡羅來納州共和黨參議員Tim Scott和馬薩諸塞州民主黨參議員Elizabeth Warren，指控阿里巴巴“肆無忌憚”且“非法”地利用2.4萬個欺詐賬戶試圖複製其技術。阿里巴巴拒絕就此指控置評。

許多科技業人士將當今的人工智能熱潮比作網絡泡沫初期，當時網絡公司蓬勃發展，但沒有人找到圍繞這項技術，建立可持續的商業模式的方法。

長期參與中國開源界別的矽谷公司 Datastrato 副總裁 Richard Lin 表示，中國領先的人工智能公司都在為生存而戰。

他說:「目前沒有一家人工智能公司擁有可持續的商業模式」; 「這並非一個健康的行業」。

So, in China, Alibaba has re-emerged as an A.I. powerhouse, creating one of the world’s most widely used A.I. systems. They 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 open source A.I. models also raised a difficult question of how to turn that global popularity into business profit. Apparently, Alibaba needs to use earning from its other business such as e-commerce, cloud computing, and digital payments (through affiliated companies) etc. for support.