China is building the future of AI, not Silicon Valley, says Alibaba Cloud founder

Time of India

3 days ago

Wang Jian, founder of Alibaba Cloud and director at Zhejiang Lab, said China is building the future of artificial intelligence (AI), not Silicon Valley.In an interview with Bloomberg, Wang said Chinese foundational AI models like Qwen and DeepSeek are much better than OpenAI's ChatGPT , adding that China is a testbed for new technology.'Foundational models like Qwen and DeepSeek are much better than ChatGPT. So we really need to fund creative people to build applications for them. In terms of applications, we are heavily biased toward OpenAI, because everyone sees ChatGPT as the only application that can provide security,' he said.'The Chinese market has a very important role in establishing new technology and making sure it is mature enough, positioning the country as a testbed of every new technology to get products to market,' he added.When asked about the stiff competition in the AI space, Wang said it's no less than a marathon for new players to enter the AI race, adding that healthy competition enables fast replication of the technology.'When people get together and it is not just for competition, whether you win or not, you can have a very fast iteration of the technology because of the competition.'Commenting on Silicon Valley's progress on building AI capabilities, he said just a single organisation, or individual, cannot go far in this journey. Additionally, he said that China is a country that benefits from a stable mindset.To make his point, Wang cited the example of Hangzhou, a city in China, claiming that one out of every four or five people there is a 'CEO.'Wang also addressed the big pay packets being offered in Silicon Valley to hire AI talent.According to him, the driving force for any organisation should be innovation, not patents.'What's happening in Silicon Valley is not the winning formula. We need the right talent, not expensive talent,' he said.'When you are in the early stage of innovation, I don't think a patent is a problem because the only thing you need to do is to get the right person, not really an expensive person,' he added. ET reported recently that over a dozen staff at Mira Murati's AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab (TML), have been approached or offered jobs by Meta.This talent poaching follows a previous instance reported when Meta hired four AI researchers from OpenAI. The tech giant has bagged top talent from companies , including OpenAI, Anthropic, and GitHub, after top-level exits and a poor reception for its latest open-source Llama 4 model.Following the trend, the Sam Altman-led OpenAI also poached four top engineers from rival firms led by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg last month.