Yesterday, Alibaba founder Jack Ma made another appearance at the Alibaba campus. Reporters learned that Jack Ma was at the Alibaba Intelligent Information Business Group, interacting with employees.

Today, after the Hong Kong stock market opened, Alibaba's stock price rose nearly 8% to reach 113.9 Hong Kong dollars, setting a new high since October of last year. Since the beginning of the year, Alibaba's stock price has increased by approximately 36%. In 2024, after completing management changes and investing a total of 16 billion USD (approximately 116.8 billion RMB) in share buybacks throughout the year, Alibaba's stock price rose by 10%. In contrast, in 2021, 2022, and 2023, Alibaba's stock price fell by approximately 48%, 19%, and 11%, respectively.

Industry analysis suggests that DeepSeek has significantly sparked international investors' interest in Chinese Technology again, and Alibaba's recent launch of a new AI model, as well as Alibaba Cloud’s integration of the DeepSeek model, have propelled the previous rise in Alibaba's Hong Kong stock.

In addition, it has been reported that Apple will collaborate with Alibaba to launch AI features in China. Informed sources disclosed that this move is part of Apple's strategy to address declining sales in China, aiming to provide more attractive Software features.

American hedge fund giants continue to increase their shareholdings.

Alex Au, General Manager of the Alphalex Capital Management Fund in Hong Kong, stated that DeepSeek has significantly sparked international investors' interest in Chinese Technology and should help narrow the valuation gap. Just a few days after the DeepSeek announcement, Alibaba unveiled its latest AI model and claimed to have achieved better results, and Alibaba Cloud’s integration of the DeepSeek model has driven the rise in Alibaba's Hong Kong stocks. Alex Au emphasized that Cloud Computing Service providers like Alibaba will be one of the main beneficiaries of this DeepSeek boom.

On Monday, billionaire investor David Tepper's Appaloosa LP submitted a 13-F filing to the SEC showing that last year's fourth quarter, the hedge fund comprehensively increased its shareholdings in Chinese stocks and China stock ETFs.

Among them, Appaloosa's holdings in Alibaba increased by 18% to 11.8 million shares, currently valued at over 1.2 billion USD. As of the end of last year, Alibaba remained its largest holding, accounting for approximately 15.4% of its 6.7 billion USD investment portfolio.

Additionally, JD.com's Hold Positions increased from approximately 7.3 million shares to about 10.5 million shares, marking an increase of about 43%. Based on the current stock price, this is valued at over 0.4 billion USD. PDD Holdings' Hold Positions increased by around 0.055 million shares to 5.4 million shares, which is an increase of about 1%. By the end of last year, PDD Holdings was the third largest Hold Position for Appaloosa, accounting for about 8.04% of its investment portfolio. KE Holdings' Hold Positions increased from about 2.18 million shares to approximately 2.57 million shares.

In September last year, Tepper called for 'Buy everything related to China', causing a stir. The report released this time shows that he has delivered on his promise.

Jack Ma: AI will change everything.

On December 8, 2024, Jack Ma appeared at the 20th anniversary event of ANT GROUP CO., LTD. and emphasized the development of AI. He stated that looking from today, the changes that the AI era can bring in the next 20 years will exceed everyone's imagination, because AI will mark a greater era. 'AI will change everything, but that does not mean AI can decide everything. Technology is indeed important, but what will truly decide the outcome in the future is what we do today that is truly valuable and different for this upcoming era,' Jack Ma added.

Today, Jack Ma appeared at the Alibaba park. The Star Daily learned that Jack Ma came to the Alibaba Intelligent Information Business Group where Quark is located to interact with employees.

Recently, Alibaba has continuously made moves in the layout of its AI To C Business, while Alibaba's Intelligent Information Business Group has taken on the responsibility of Alibaba AI's C-end applications. Previously, Alibaba's AI application 'Tongyi' was integrated into Alibaba's Intelligent Information Business Group, becoming two C-end brands developed alongside Quark. This month, world-class AI scientist and former Salesforce Group vice president Xu Zhuhong was appointed as Alibaba Group's vice president, responsible for multimodal foundational models and agents-related basic research and application solutions for AI To C business.

In terms of foundational large models, the technological progress of Alibaba's Tongyi large model has attracted market attention. On the first day of the Lunar New Year, the Alibaba Cloud Tongyi Qianwen flagship model Qwen2.5-Max was released. On the Chatbot Arena LLM Leaderboard, Qwen2.5-Max ranked seventh globally with a score of 1332, surpassing models such as DeepSeek V3, o1-mini, and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. At the same time, Qwen2.5-Max ranked first in mathematics and programming, and second in Hard prompts.

Recently, research teams from Stanford and Berkeley have used Alibaba's Qwen2.5 large model for fine-tuning to replicate the DeepSeek-R1 model at a low cost. Among them, Stanford University professor Fei-Fei Li's team trained a new inference model using Alibaba's open-source Qwen2.5 model with cloud computing costs of less than 50 USD. Meanwhile, the Pan Jiayi team from the University of California, Berkeley, replicated the core functions of DeepSeek R1-Zero at a low cost of 30 USD.

It is worth mentioning that DeepSeek has also chosen Tongyi Qianwen as its foundational model. Reportedly, DeepSeek will distill DeepSeek-R1 into six open-source models, four of which are based on the Qwen series. In particular, the model distilled from Qwen-32B has already achieved performance comparable to OpenAI's o1-mini.

DeepSeek has also brought new opportunities for cloud infrastructure to Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba Cloud has fully launched six full-size DeepSeek models on its Bailian platform.

The large model sector may see a flourishing of various developments.

In the view of Shi Mao, a partner at Changlei Capital, this breakthrough by DeepSeek has opened a window for the Global stage. 'The emergence of DeepSeek confirms the arrival of the native era of AI, where models are applications. Previously, when people mentioned models as applications, many thought it was about making some applications based on foundational models. But DeepSeek has proven that there may be an explosion of various model fine-tuning in the future.'

In other words, future entrepreneurs, even those focusing on application-based ventures, will certainly need to possess model capabilities. 'By addressing a specific bottleneck in model technology, unique models with distinct capabilities in various scenarios can be created. For instance, while DeepSeek has considerable ability in reasoning and can even rival OpenAI's O1 model, OpenAI still leads in terms of generalization comprehensively. Therefore, in the future, there may be a situation where various models flourish. This will differ from the previous assumption that only a few foundational large models would exist, leading to a monopoly era.'

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