At the opening of the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit on November 3, Alibaba co-founder and board chairman Joseph Tsai said only open source can popularize AI, arguing that open models effectively lower research cost for small and medium enterprises and matter especially for developing countries, Interface News reported.
Tsai revealed that Alibaba's Qwen team has open-sourced more than 470 models over the past three-plus years, with cumulative global downloads surpassing 4 billion and derivative models exceeding 330,000. Opening smaller-size models lets researchers run experiments at relatively low cost and feed results back into the community, forming a continuous innovation loop.
The summit, themed "Open Source, Open Access, Co-Build and Share," highlighted open source as a public collaborative paradigm for technology innovation, industry governance and international cooperation. Chinese tech firms have kept expanding model open-sourcing and ecosystem openness, with key metrics such as download volume and derivative-model count staying in the lead.
Source: Interface News / World Internet Conference
