Meet the young engineers steering Alibaba’s AI future at Tongyi Lab

Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen family of large artificial intelligence models is currently the world’s largest open-source AI ecosystem.

At the core of the Chinese company’s road map towards Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) – a hypothetical form of AI that far surpasses human intelligence – is Tongyi Lab, an engineering powerhouse composed of some of the country’s brightest young talent.

They are the architects behind the Qwen series of foundational models that have captured global attention, including its largest model to date with more than 1 trillion parameters.

Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post.

At the company’s annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou last month, some of Tongyi’s lead engineers stepped into the spotlight to share the team’s mission and latest advancements.

Here is a look at this group’s latest achievements and the direction of their research.

Lin Junyang