SHANGHAI, March 16 (Reuters) – Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu will head its newly formed Alibaba Token Hub business group, which will focus on building artificial intelligence work platforms for enterprises, the firm said in a statement on Monday.
The new group will comprise existing Alibaba units Tongyi Laboratory, MaaS Business Line, Qwen, Wukong, and AI Innovation.
“I will lead ATH directly, with a mandate to drive strategic coordination across our AI businesses, embed AI deeply into how we work, and preserve the agility that lets us move fast,” Wu said in a memo to Alibaba staff.
The latest move follows questions about its AI strategy raised following the early March exit of Alibaba’s Qwen AI model division head, Lin Junyang, the third senior Qwen executive to exit this year.
Chinese firms, most of which offer open-source AI models that are free to download, have seen token prices drop dramatically amid intense domestic competition between leading tech firms.
Top models like DeepSeek, Qwen and Zhipu’s ChatGLM cost up to 10 to 20 times less than U.S. counterparts as Chinese players use cost-effectiveness to shore up global market share, simultaneously raising questions about profitability.
Alibaba is due to report quarterly earnings on Thursday.
(Reporting by Casey Hall; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Jan Harvey)
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