Last week, Chinese tech conglomerate Alibaba announced a major uptick in AI spending.
Now, the company has put a price tag on the effort, according to a Monday (Feb. 24) report by Reuters: at least 380 billion yuan, or $52.44 billion, over a three-year period.
During an earnings call last week, the company said it would spend more on artificial intelligence (AI) in the next three years than it has in the last 10, without providing an exact figure. The goal, management said, is to help Alibaba pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a version of AI that can think and reason at or above the level of humans.
“We aim to continue to develop models that extend the boundaries of intelligence. Why is that the primary aim?” Eddie Wu, the company’s CEO, said during the earnings call.
“Well, it’s because all of the visible AI application scenarios today that we see around content creation, search and so on and so forth have arisen precisely as a result of the ongoing extension of those boundaries, and we want to keep pushing out those boundaries to create more and more opportunities.”
As PYMNTS wrote earlier this year, developing AGI has become a goal for most of the world’s biggest tech players such as OpenAI, Google and Meta.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “fanned the flames” — as that report put it — at the beginning of the year when he wrote on his blog that the company is “now confident we know how to build AGI” as the technology has been traditionally recognized.
“Achieving AGI would have big implications for business. For example, one AI system can analyze market trends while simultaneously redesigning the supply chain to adapt to those changes,” PYMNTS wrote.
“It can handle customer service while using those interactions to inform product development. It can manage operations while developing innovative solutions to efficiency problems. It can make strategic decisions by synthesizing information across multiple industries and domains, which requires high-level general reasoning.”
The Reuters report notes that Alibaba has begun 2025 as “a winner in China’s AI race,” attracting investors with its business deals, and seeing its stock climb more than 68% this year.
Perhaps the company’s most high-profile deal is the one it recently inked with Apple, to help that company develop an AI-powered iPhone for sale in China. Restrictions by the Chinese government require companies to have a local partner before launching AI products.
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