Alibaba touts new AI chip, Qwen Intelligence and age of machine intelligence

Alibaba launched its Zhenwu V900, its most powerful AI chip that has three times the performance of its predecessor. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said the chip along with the Qwen family of models is designed to deliver a full AI stack in China and user in an era of "machine intelligence."

Wu's keynote at Alibaba's Apsara Conference in Hangzhou offered a bevy of key themes from the company.

Wu said the following on the product front:

• "Currently, Alibaba’s Qwen team is exploring RSI (recursive self-improvement) and has made meaningful progress. The team is continuing to advance research on model architecture and data optimization, and plans to train a new model at the scale of 5 to 10 trillion-parameter, with the goal of completing more complex, longer-horizon tasks and advancing toward ASI (artificial superintelligence)."
• "Today, T-Head is building a comprehensive portfolio of data center chips: the “Zhenwu” series for GPU chips, the “Yitian” series for CPU chips, the “Panmai” series for smart NICs, and ICN interconnect chips. The portfolio fully covers the core chips required to build ultra-large-scale AI clusters."
• "We are introducing our next-generation AI chip, the Zhenwu V900. It is the most powerful AI chip in China today, delivering three times the performance of its predecessor, the Zhenwu M890. A single cluster built on V900 can support up to 500,000 cards to power frontier model training and inference. Backed by the proven maturity of T-head product lines and widespread adoption across our clients, we anticipate a significant growth in the annual AI chip shipment volumes."
• "Alibaba will join forces with all our partners to commit fully to AI infrastructure development, forging an AI cloud designed for the Machine Intelligence era. Our target is that by 2032, the global data center capacity operated by Alibaba Cloud will surpass 20GW, fueling the industry’s exponentially rising demand for AI."

Machine intelligence focused

The company has strong cloud momentum with Alibaba Cloud and is looking to advance to what Wu dubbed machine intelligence. Alibaba's take is more accessible than the superintelligence banter in the US and more industrial in scope.

"Today, machine power already drives 99.9% of the world’s physical work. In the future, the total amount of human thinking will continue to grow, but machine thinking will expand even faster, ultimately shouldering 99.9% of all thinking," said Wu in his keynote. "The demand for thinking will no longer scale with population, but with the depth of machine intelligence. The total volume of machine thinking will far surpass that of human thinking."

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Wu's take on machine intelligence is that AI infrastructure will scale and thinking will be as abundant and accessible as power. Wu added that machine intelligence isn't a substitute for humans, but "an entirely different species." Generating code and writing reports is just a start.

"The truly groundbreaking products of the machine intelligence era have not yet arrived," said Wu.

For now, Alibaba is focused on the machine intelligence cornerstones of AI models, AI chops and AI cloud. Wu said that technical pathway to what Alibaba calls artificial superintelligence is in sight.

The Alibaba vision of machine intelligence will extend to infrastructure and cloud to desktop and mobile. To that end, Alibaba launched Qwen Intelligence, which gives smartphone makers a platform to build AI assistants to handle complex and cross-app tasks. Honor is the first smartphone partner to adopt Qwen Intelligence.

The Qwen Intelligence effort is Alibaba's latest addition to its AI software stack. Alibaba also said QwenWork hit 30 million users in the first month of availability.