Alibaba leverages cloud business to become a leading AI investor in China

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Alibaba has been leveraging its vast cloud computing infrastructure to become a leading investor in China’s generative artificial intelligence start-ups, offering them credits to use the scarce network resources needed to train models rather than conventional cash-for-equity funding. The Chinese ecommerce giant is trying to replicate the success of Microsoft’s investment in the US leader, OpenAI, by taking stakes in prominent start-ups Moonshot, Zhipu, MiniMax and 01.ai. They have all been developing local versions of US applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Character.ai’s avatar chatbot. The Kimi intelligent assistant launched by Moonshot AI in March. (CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)...