Embracing the open-source approach is the only way for Europe to achieve technological independence, Alibaba Group Holding chairman Joe Tsai said, pointing to China’s own open-source drive as a blueprint for innovation under constraints. For Europe, which shares China’s deep roots in traditional manufacturing, the open-source approach presented a unique opportunity, Tsai said, highlighting that factories in the region possessed highly valuable manufacturing data. “You don’t want to feed it into some closed-source API. You want to maintain those data and be able to take open-source models and then further train your model, and improve it for your use,” he said. The comments, which were made by the Alibaba co-founder earlier this week at the Wave tech event in Italy, came as Alibaba itself is doubling down on the open-source approach to become a leading player in the global AI boom. Tsai described the company’s current era – from 2023 onwards – as its “AD period”, pivoting away from past unfocused expansion to a strict dual focus on e-commerce and full-stack AI. Tsai, who co-founded Alibaba with Jack Ma and others in 1999, became the group chairman in 2023. The Hangzhou-based tech giant was using the US$25 billion free cash flow generated by its e-commerce operations to fund AI infrastructure and model development, Tsai said, adding that the group had doubled capital expenditure on computing infrastructure every year for the past three years. On US-China tech competition, Tsai drew a sharp contrast between the current strategies of AI developers in the two countries. “Chinese companies are open sourcing their innovation, they write papers,” he said. “The American closed-source labs don’t write papers any more because they don’t want to share.” Tsai argued that US export controls on advanced technologies have fuelled the development of China’s AI ecosystem. In an analogy that he has used previously, Tsai likened US firms to children born in resourced, wealthy families, while noting that China has more motivation to work hard and innovate because it does not have the same resources. Alibaba has been making an aggressive push through this approach, as highlighted by the company’s announcements at its annual Apsara Conference in September. During the event, the company debuted the Zhenwu V900 processor, billing it as “the most powerful AI chip in China today”, and teased plans to train an AI model with up to 10 trillion parameters. Looking forward, Tsai predicted that AI would go beyond a stand-alone novelty to become an integral part of everyday life over the next few years. “Five years from now, we won’t be talking about AI per se,” the 62-year-old said. “AI would have been infused in every aspect of our business. For the same reason, we don’t talk about the internet today, but the internet is everywhere.” Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.