An Alibaba Group Holding executive has urged hard work and endurance in an internal blog post after founder Jack Ma Yun and top executives gathered for a rice-planting team-building event, as the Chinese tech giant sharpens its artificial intelligence strategies.
“The laws of the fields are very simple: when the season arrives, you must plant when it’s time to plant, and endure when it’s time to endure,” Liu Zhenfei, Alibaba partner and chairman of mapping service Amap, wrote in an article published on Alibaba’s intranet on Monday, according to Chinese news outlets.
Liu’s post referred to a recent activity in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, where Ma joined executives including CEO Eddie Wu Yongming, chief technology officer Wu Zeming and chief scientist Zhou Jingren to plant rice seedlings.
“A dozen or so of us worked all morning, yet we only managed to plant half an acre of paddy field crookedly,” Liu wrote.
But he also struck a positive note, saying: “As long as you tend to the soil, choose the right seedlings, and do every little thing with care, just leave the rest to time. The land will never let you down.”
Other attendees included Alibaba’s E-commerce Business Group CEO Jiang Fan, chief people officer Jane Fang Jiang, Ant Group chairman Eric Xiandong Jing and CEO Cyril Xinyi Han.
Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The rare gathering came as Alibaba pushes to focus its sprawling business on artificial intelligence.
Earlier this month, it established a new unit called Token Foundry, combining its large language model team Tongyi Lab and video generation developer Future Life Lab, led by group CEO Wu.
The restructuring also elevated Tongyi Lab head Zhou to chief scientist and leader of the newly established Alibaba AI Future Research Institute, tasked with frontier AI research and next-generation breakthroughs.
Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai said at the VivaTech technology conference in Paris last week that AI could ultimately represent a US$50 trillion market, underpinning the company’s “full-stack” strategy spanning chips, cloud infrastructure, foundation models and consumer applications.
Last year, Alibaba committed more than US$53 billion to AI and cloud infrastructure over three years. Tsai signalled further spending, saying “it behoves all the companies in China to step up their investment”. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
