Alibaba's Joseph Tsai discusses AI development at Wuzhen: only open source and openness can bring inclusive, widespread access

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On the morning of November 3, the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit opened. Joseph Tsai, co-founder and chairman of the board of Alibaba Group, spoke at the opening ceremony. He said that AI can only become widespread if it is open source, and only widespread adoption can create a sustainable and inclusive intelligent era. China's open-source models remain leading in key indicators such as download volume and the number of derivative models, and China is currently the global leader in open-source intelligence. The image shows Joseph Tsai, co-founder and chairman of the board of Alibaba Group, speaking at the opening ceremony of the Wuzhen Summit.

Tsai said that over the past year, the pace of global artificial intelligence development has accelerated, pushing this productivity transformation to greater depth. AI use cases have continued to enrich and scale, extending into fields such as industrial manufacturing, healthcare, public services, enterprise office work, and scientific and technological research and development. Demand for AI continues to rise, and computing power is in short supply. Chinese technology companies have continued to step up model open-sourcing and ecosystem openness, remaining leading in key indicators such as open-source model downloads and the number of derivative models, and have become the current global leader in open-source intelligence. Chinese open-source models have good overall performance and high inference efficiency, are widely praised around the world, and are highly competitive.

Tsai believes that Chinese AI companies independently chose open source, stemming from the core spirit of Chinese innovation: transcending self-interest, enhancing common well-being, promoting the improvement of wisdom through sharing, and being willing to create greater value by helping each other succeed. He believes: "Only open source can make AI widespread, and only widespread adoption can create a sustainable and inclusive intelligent era."

Open source and openness: reducing R&D costs for SMEs and benefiting developing countries

Three years ago, Alibaba proposed an AI strategy of "open source and openness." To date, Alibaba's Qwen has open-sourced more than 470 models, with cumulative global downloads exceeding 4 billion and more than 330,000 derivative models, making it the world's No. 1 open-source model family. Tsai said that open source promotes the prosperity of the global developer ecosystem, effectively reduces R&D costs for SMEs, and is especially valuable for minority languages and developing countries. Based on open-source models, AI is no longer exclusive to a few technological powers, but has become an undertaking in which all parties can participate deeply. Developers from the vast number of emerging economies can quickly create their own countries' AI applications and innovation ecosystems without starting from scratch, effectively bridging the intelligence gap between countries and regions. He gave an example: in Uganda, Africa, a nonprofit organization developed a local language model based on the open-source Qwen model, which has already covered 68 African languages, helping more and more Africans cross the threshold of foundation models, break through language limitations, and join hands in entering the door of AI.

According to the introduction, ModelScope, created and operated by Alibaba, is China's largest AI open-source community and has now attracted 33 million users from 239 countries and regions around the world. In this open community, global developers can access 280,000 open-source models, 40,000 datasets, and 12,000 MCPs (Model Context Protocols). Tsai said: "Based in China and serving the world is the positioning of the ModelScope community and also Alibaba's mission for AI ecosystem building."

At this World Internet Conference, Alibaba exhibited the latest achievements of its T-Head chips, Alibaba Cloud's "cloud + AI" services, the Qwen large model, and a series of AI applications. Alibaba's agent platform Qoder won the "Leading Science and Technology Award" for its technological breakthrough in the agent Harness, and is the only general-purpose agent product in China to receive this award.

In the medical field, the "non-contrast CT + AI" technology launched by Alibaba DAMO Academy has continued to make breakthroughs, becoming the first in the world to simultaneously screen 5 types of cancer, 2 types of acute conditions, and 5 types of chronic diseases with a single non-contrast CT scan. DAMO RADAR, a general medical imaging AI model recently developed jointly by DAMO Academy and institutions such as the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, can identify more than 146 diseases at once, with accuracy reaching the level of radiology experts for the first time. The results were published in the top international academic journal Science. Alibaba open-sourced this model immediately.

In the consumer field, since the beginning of this year, Alibaba's Qwen App has taken the lead in achieving "AI errands," providing users with services such as food ordering, shopping, and flight and hotel booking. It recently also launched an exclusive personal AI assistant, "Qwen Go!", which can handle personal affairs of more types and in more fields.

In the office field, Alibaba recently launched a one-stop AI office platform, "Qwen Office," deeply integrated into the DingTalk ecosystem and connected with enterprise databases and mainstream instant messaging tools. It integrates multimodal content generation, browser automation, web page production, scheduled task scheduling, and a full set of Office document processing capabilities to help enterprises improve organizational efficiency. news_keyword_pub,stock, iframe below the main text iframe below the main text General statement

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