Machine Thoughts, Mass-Produced: Alibaba Opens China's AI Week With a 1,000-to-1 Prediction
At the Yunqi conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba's chief executive predicted machines will eventually supply more than a thousand times humanity's thinking, as Xiaomi open-sourced a top-ranked model, Meta's agent app Muse topped the US App Store, and Chinese phones began shipping assistants that operate your apps for you.
The arithmetic Alibaba's chief executive offered on Tuesday was almost theological: machines today supply less than three percent of the world's thinking, and they will end up doing 99.9 percent of it — a total volume of machine thought more than a thousand times humanity's. Wu Yongming was speaking at the opening of the Yunqi conference in Hangzhou, the annual stage where Alibaba lays out where it thinks computing is going. As the industrial revolution turned power into a commodity through steam, combustion and electricity, he argued, this one turns thought into one. Three pillars hold it up, he said: models, chips and cloud.
The claims came with hardware. Alibaba's Qwen team is planning models at 5 to 10 trillion parameters; the company showed off a new AI chip, the Zhenwu V900, its strongest yet; and its chip subsidiary T-Head laid out a line of Yitian server CPUs — the 720 and 730, due in 2027 — built to interconnect directly with its AI chips over a proprietary bus "for the agentic era." Alibaba says its datacenter capacity will pass 20 gigawatts by 2032. For consumers, the new Qwen AI glasses, the N1 and N1 Pro, and a pair of ear-clip earbuds went on pre-order on Tuesday, with shelves expected October 13. The phone maker Honor said its coming Magic9 flagship will carry the industry's first system-level "Agent Harness" operating system, built with Alibaba's models.
The week's open-source shot came at dawn. At 00:00 on Tuesday, Xiaomi released MiMo-V2.6, its first new model family in five months — two native multimodal models, Flash and Pro — and published the weights. On Artificial Analysis, the independent leaderboard, the Pro version now ranks first among open models, ahead of Kimi's K3 and Alibaba's Qwen3.8 Max; Xiaomi's pitch, Caixin reported, is price, a twentieth to a sixtieth of comparable foreign models. The lab's own term for the path it says it is on with reinforcement learning: "recursive self-improvement."
The louder story, though, is agents — software that does not answer questions but acts: booking, buying, filing, operating other apps. Meta's Muse, released barely two weeks ago, has shot to the top of the US App Store's free chart, past ChatGPT and Claude; Meta's shares closed up 11.4 percent on Monday, adding roughly 200 billion dollars in market value in a day. China's version is already on shelves: the Doubao phone assistant, ByteDance's agent, shipped this month on the Nubia NaviX Ultra and operates across the phone's apps on the user's behalf. Analysts quoted on Baidu's hot board noted what such an assistant quietly rearranges — when an agent, not the user, taps through each app, the power to explain and decide migrates from the super-apps to the system layer, a scheduling war in the making. Beijing has already drawn one boundary in this territory, switching off 'grief' agents under new rules.
The chip side convenes on Wednesday at the Snapdragon Summit, where fans expect "heavyweight upgrades" — the promise the star KPL player NoFear passed along as Qualcomm's new gaming-technology "experience officer." The summit's own slogan doubles as the week's summary, and as the industry's direction of travel: from giving answers, to acting for you (从给出答案，到为你行动).