Alibaba in open-source boom

Staff reporter

Alibaba (9988) will expand open-source models with 72 billion parameters, which will be China's largest open-source in terms of parameter size, said chief executive Wu Yongming at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, mainland media reported.

Artificial intelligence computing will eventually take over all computing resources, Wu noted.

He believes that the combination of AI and cloud computing is the underlying ability of Alibaba Cloud to support AI infrastructure services in the future.

At the same event, Baidu's (9888) chair and chief executive Robin Li Yanhong said that tech companies should not rush to develop their own large models as it will result in an enormous waste of social resources.

A new era of AI will come only when AI-native products occur, he added.

Meanwhile, ByteDance's virtual reality unit, Pico, has dismissed over 300 employees, accounting for nearly 23 percent of the team, according to the company's response to media inquiry.

The layoffs are mainly in the marketing, video and platform operations departments.

Most of the software team will be merged into ByteDance's product development team, while the hardware and maintenance team will remain the same.