Alibaba Cloud Officially Announces Two New ‘Spokespersons’

On July 8th, Alibaba Cloud officially announced two new “spokespersons” – Yang Zhilin, founder of Moonshot AI and Zhang Yuejia, President of Zhaopin Group.

This is the first public announcement of the collaboration between Moonshot AI and Alibaba Cloud. Information shows that Alibaba Cloud’s computing power and large-scale model service platform help improve the model inference efficiency of Moonshot AI, accelerate Kimi intelligent assistant to achieve technological breakthroughs. In addition, Zhaopin Group’s large-scale model applications are also rapidly deployed and supported online based on Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud is one of the few companies in the world that has both its own AI capabilities and cloud computing business. Based on its self-developed Apsara cloud computing operating system, it provides customers with a comprehensive three-tier architecture of IaaS, PaaS, and MaaS (Model as a Service) cloud services. For large-scale model services, Alibaba Cloud offers enterprises high-performance and low-cost computing resources, as well as tool platform services for large model training, fine-tuning, and inference.

In October last year, Alibaba Cloud proposed to create the most open cloud in the AI era, increasing research and development investment, conducting comprehensive technological upgrades and innovations from underlying computing power to AI platforms and model services. At the level of large models, Alibaba Cloud’s key strategy is open source. In June this year, Alibaba Cloud released the globally powerful open-source model Qwen2, with performance surpassing many closed-source models in China. A series of various sizes of open-source models in the past have already formed significant influence for Tongyi Qwen in the global open-source community ecosystem.

Besides developing large models in-house, Alibaba is also one of the most aggressive investors in large models. External information shows that Alibaba has invested in the top five valued large model startups in the AI industry, including Zhipu AI, 01.AI, Baichuan AI, MiniMax, and Moonshot AI. According to Alibaba‘s annual report, it invested a total of about $800 million in Moonshot AI during the 2024 fiscal year and acquired approximately 36% equity.

SEE ALSO: Alibaba Reveals Investment Details in Moonshot AI: $800 Million to Acquire 36% Stake

The industry generally expects that the combination of AI and cloud will bring higher growth to future businesses. Previously, Alibaba Group CEO and Alibaba Cloud CEO Eddie Wu revealed during an investor conference call that he expects Alibaba Cloud to return to double-digit revenue growth in the second half of fiscal year 2025.