Alibaba Group Holding is reinforcing its team at Tongyi Lab by transferring artificial intelligence scientist Steven Hoi Chu-hong from its consumer product division to the unit responsible for foundational model development initiatives, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Hoi joined Alibaba in January as chief scientist of its Intelligent Information Platform, which oversees consumer-facing businesses including the group’s chatbot, UC Browser and Quark search engine. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
At the time, he was tasked with leading multimodal foundation model research, agent-related studies and applied AI solutions for consumer products, according to a report by Chinese media outlet Jiemian.
Hoi’s transfer to Tongyi Lab reflects efforts at Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing services unit of Alibaba, to further develop the group’s core AI capabilities.
Alibaba Cloud has released more than 300 open-source AI models, supporting over 170,000 derivatives, which has made its Qwen family of models the world’s largest open-source AI ecosystem, according to data announced last week at the company’s annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, the capital of eastern Zhejiang province.
The company’s flagship suite of models, Qwen3, which was introduced in April, has expanded into a family covering text, image, audio and visual tasks, along with multimodal systems tailored for real-world applications. The latest variant, Qwen3-Max, unveiled on Wednesday, features more than 1 trillion parameters.
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