Chinese group Alibaba is reorienting its artificial intelligence strategy toward revenue-generating models, marking a potential shift from the open-source approach that contributed to the success of the Qwen family. The British newspaper “Financial Times” reports: Zhou Jingren, former chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud, took over the leadership of the AI division following internal tensions over strategy and the departure of senior figures from the Qwen team. The Chinese group now aims to strengthen its so-called “model-as-a-service” model, integrating AI tools into its e-commerce ecosystem and increasing the weight of proprietary models offered via the cloud. This move reflects a broader industry trend: the value is shifting from the pure performance of models to concrete applications, such as coding and autonomous agents, capable of generating ongoing use and revenue. According to the newspaper, internal concerns had grown over the high costs of open source and the lack of a clear monetization path, despite the strong support of Qwen from the global developer community. Alibaba will continue to publish advanced open source models in some areas, but the strategic priority now appears aligned with the group’s cloud and revenue objectives. There are a couple of issues here: Revenue, for sure. Capability. As these models get more critically capable, the bigger labs will be reasonably reluctant to OSS them. There is potential for liability and dangerous uplift. It’s worth noting right now that GLM 5.1 is likely leading the pack in terms of OSS models, though it is very big and requires some hefty memory and also gpu if you want tokens per second faster than a crawl. Notably, GLM 5.1 beats Opus 4.6 on SWE-BENCH-PRO. https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.1 submitted by /u/kaggleqrdl
Originally posted by u/kaggleqrdl on r/ArtificialInteligence
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