I talked a bit about Amazon and Apple teaming up to develop AI strategies to compete and beat Alphabet/Google and Microsoft the other day. It got me thinking: why are we talking the American Big Tech giants when there are several Big Tech Asian giants namely Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and NVIDIA themselves. What are their AI thoughts, strategies and ambitions?
Just the other day, NVIDIA’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang was talking with SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son about their sweeping vision for Japan’s role in the AI revolution.
In their hour and a half exchange, Huang underscored that AI infrastructure is essential to drive global transformation and made a delineation between physical and digital AI. Physical AI is represented by robotics whilst digital AI is represented by automated agents. Japan is poised to create both types, leveraging its unique language, culture and data.
“Every industry, every company, every country must produce a new industrial revolution,” Huang said, pointing to AI as the catalyst for this shift. He then added that Japan will lead the robotics AI revolution as the country has “created some of the world’s best robots. These are the robots we grew up with, the robots we’ve loved our whole lives.”
You can read more here and I found it interesting that NVIDIA wants to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer … something we heard last week at the AWS re:Invent conference last week, except that this would be created by AWS.
I then turned my head to China and, specifically, Alibaba and Tencent.
Alibaba Group saw its offerings in artificial intelligence (AI) drive major growth in its retail and cloud businesses during the third quarter 2024, “guided by our user-first, AI-driven strategy,” Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu said last month, during the company’s quarterly earnings call.
This is based upon their AI-powered marketing tool, Quanzhantui, which focused upon customer-intelligent marketing. What that means is do what is in the customer’s interests for sale, marketing and service, rather than the company’s focus. That’s a bit of a turn-around from most banks I deal with.
During the call, Alibaba also announced a global sourcing product driven by AI. The AI engine finds wholesale products in response to businesses’ text or image prompts and “reimagines international procurement through conversational search, making global sourcing easier for [small- to medium-sized businesses] while improving overall platform transaction efficiency,” Fan Jiang, CEO of Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group, said during the call.
This is expanded upon by Tencent – Alibaba’ big tech rival – who have a strapline to “Make AI Everywhere”.
Tencent is not new to AI. It has been investing in AI research and development since 2016 when it established its AI Lab. It has also launched several AI products and services, such as WeChat AI, Tencent Cloud AI, and Tencent Music AI. However, Tencent has not been able to establish itself as a global leader in AI, unlike its US counterparts such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon … but that may change with the launch of Hunyuan, a large language model that Tencent AI claims can rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Tencent AI unveiled Hunyuan for enterprise use in September 2023, and it quickly became one of the most popular AI models in China, along with Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen and Baidu’s Ernie Bot. Hunyuan can perform various tasks, such as text summarization, sentiment analysis, dialogue generation, and knowledge extraction.
Did I mention Baidu there? Baidu, as in China’s version of Google?
As reported by Reuters last month, Baidu unveiled a slew of new applications for its artificial intelligence technology including an enhanced text-to-image generation technology and a pair of glasses featuring a built-in AI assistant, developed by its hardware division Xiaodu. The gadget is equipped with cameras to capture photos and videos and supports voice interactions powered by Erni, its latest generative AI product and knowledge-enhanced large language model (LLM).
Baidu also introduced a tool, Miaoda, that enables users to develop software applications without coding expertise. This is fascinating as it means we move from content creators to business creators.
In a similar way, I thought it was interesting that, during the re:Ignite AWS conference, Amazon dropped an AI Agent that converts COBOL code into modern tech stacks. This is transformational technologies that take our technical debt and give it the kiss of life. Maybe we no longer need to think about legacy structures. We just revive them with AI.
The whole world is being turbo-charged for transformation by technology. It’s hard to keep up and, the real point of this blog entry, is that you must look worldwide and not just to Silicon Valley for the changes that are taking place. For more, checkout these links:
- ‘Every Industry, Every Company, Every Country Must Produce a New Industrial Revolution,’ NVIDIA CEO Says | NVIDIA Blog
- Alibaba Says AI Drives Growth in Retail and Cloud Businesses
- Tencent AI: A New Strategy for China’s Tech Giant to Thrive - HyScaler
- How Tencent is redefining AI with foundation models - Tech Wire Asia
- Baidu bolsters AI lineup with enhanced text-to-image tech, no-code app builder | Reuters
Postscript:
What really gets me is that we are in an AI arms race with the leading global players at the forefront … what are they doing about Quantum computing? And did anyone mention IBM?
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...
