Alibaba Group Holding founder Jack Ma on Tuesday made a low-key visit to the Hangzhou campus of Ant Group that coincided with the Chinese fintech giant’s launch of LingGuang, a next-generation multimodal artificial intelligence assistant.
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Ma, who had relinquished his control of the fintech company and resigned from all corporate roles at Alibaba, was seen accompanied by Ant Group chairman Eric Jing Xiandong and CEO Cyril Han Xinyi during his tour of the campus. Ant Group is an affiliate of Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post.
Tuesday’s visit marked almost a year since Ma, who is still regarded as the spiritual leader of the Alibaba business empire he created, gave a rare public speech at Ant Group’s 20th anniversary in December, when he touted that “the changes brought by artificial intelligence in the next 20 years will go beyond everyone’s imagination, as AI will bring a greater era”.
The 61-year-old Chinese tech billionaire said at the time that Ant Group would continue to use technology to bring “progress and changes” to people’s lives in the next two decades.
Ant Group on Tuesday unveiled LingGuang, an AI assistant designed to help users create a variety of simple apps in as little as 30 seconds – including a calorie tracker, a Pac-Man-style game and a Chinese character memorisation tool – based on natural language prompts.
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Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud – the AI and cloud services unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba – this week pushed the beta testing of its consumer AI assistant, Qwen, which some analysts saw as having the potential to become China’s AI-era super app in the same vein that Tencent Holdings’ WeChat defined the mobile internet age.
