Key facts
- Tsai said Alibaba's Qwen family has open-sourced more than 470 models, per his remarks at the summit.
- Tsai put cumulative global downloads of Qwen open-source models above 4 billion.
- Tsai said Qwen has more than 330,000 derivative models built on its open releases.
- Tsai said open source cuts AI development costs for small and medium-sized enterprises and developing countries.
Alibaba Group Holding chairman Joe Tsai said on November 3 that open source is the only viable path to creating a sustainable artificial intelligence industry, speaking at the opening ceremony of the annual World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit in eastern China's Zhejiang province.
Tsai said AI demand keeps climbing while computing power remains in short supply. He said Chinese technology companies have kept widening their open-source model releases and open ecosystems, and that Chinese open-source models combine strong overall performance with high inference efficiency.
He put figures on Alibaba's own effort: the Qwen family has open-sourced more than 470 models, cumulative global downloads have passed 4 billion, and more than 330,000 derivative models have been built on it. Tsai said that makes Qwen the world's largest open-source model family, a claim he made in his remarks.
Tsai said open source brings down research and development costs for small and medium-sized enterprises and matters especially for developing countries. He said Alibaba proposed its open-source and open-ecosystem AI strategy three years ago.