Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s engineers canceled vacations and worked through the Chinese New Year holiday to play catch up after DeepSeek shocked the global tech industry with its low-cost, powerful artificial-intelligence model in January.
The Chinese e-commerce company realised it had fallen behind in AI after the introduction of DeepSeek’s R1 model, Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai said at the VivaTech conference in Paris on Wednesday. He offered the anecdote as an example of how competitive the Chinese tech industry has become.
“Our engineering leads decided, they said, ‘Cancel your Chinese New Year holiday. Everybody stay in the company. Sleep in the office. We are going to accelerate our development’,” he said. “Within a few weeks, we launched our version, which is the Qwen series of models, which is not bad. It’s very, quite competitive.”
Chinese New Year, one of the most important annual holidays in China as people use the extended break to spend time with their families, started in late January this year and extended into early February.
Alibaba has since been releasing new models at a rapid clip as it pivots to focus on AI and especially artificial general intelligence. It has also pledged to invest more than 380bil yuan (RM223.18bil) on AI infrastructure such as data centres over the next three years.
The Chinese company has secured a partnership with Apple Inc to provide AI tech for iPhones, Tsai said earlier this year, although the deal has attracted scrutiny from US officials.
The returns of Alibaba’s massive investments also remain uncertain. The company’s March quarter sales grew a mere 7%, as its performance was dragged down by a prolonged Chinese economic slowdown. – Bloomberg
