Last year, the titans of China’s technology industry received a rare invitation to meet with Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, in the ceremonial Great Hall of the People.

去年，中国科技巨头的高管们收到了一份罕见的邀请，前往庄严的人民大会堂与中国领导人习近平会面。

But when the entrepreneurs — including the heads of national stars like the telecommunications giant Huawei and rising companies like the robotics start-up Unitree — assembled in neat rows before Mr. Xi, an unexpected figure was among them: Jack Ma.

当这些企业家——包括电信巨头华为等国家级科技明星企业的负责人、机器人初创公司宇树科技等新兴企业的掌门人——在领导人面前整齐列坐时，人群中出现了一个意想不到的面孔：马云。

Mr. Ma, who founded the Alibaba e-commerce empire in a cramped Hangzhou apartment and became a rock star of China’s internet era, had all but vanished from public view since Beijing torpedoed the planned $34 billion public offering of one of his companies after he criticized regulators in 2020.

马云在杭州一间狭小的公寓里创立了电商帝国阿里巴巴，成为中国互联网时代的传奇人物。2020年，他对监管机构公开提出批评，北京随后叫停了其旗下公司原计划进行的340亿美元IPO，此后他几乎从公众视野中消失。

Now, however, Alibaba has re-emerged as an A.I. powerhouse, creating one of the world’s most widely used A.I. systems.

然而，如今阿里巴巴已重新崛起，成为人工智能领域的重要力量，打造出全球使用最广泛的人工智能系统之一。

Alibaba made its most popular A.I. models open source, allowing others to use and modify them freely. That made its technology much cheaper to use than proprietary systems from U.S. competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI, helping the company attract users around the world.

阿里巴巴将其最受欢迎的人工智能模型开源，允许其他人自由使用和修改。这使其技术的使用成本远低于Anthropic、OpenAI等美国竞争对手的闭源系统，帮助该公司吸引了全球各地的用户。

But it also raised a difficult question — how to turn that global popularity into a profitable business. It’s a challenge that many companies with open-source technologies face and one that is dividing Alibaba’s A.I. team.

然而，这也引出了一个棘手问题——如何将庞大的全球用户基础转化为盈利的商业模式。这是众多拥有开源技术的公司都面临的挑战，也是导致阿里巴巴人工智能团队内部出现分歧的原因所在。

Alibaba became one of China’s most valuable companies on the strength of its globe-spanning e-commerce business. But in recent years, it has been outmaneuvered by lower-cost rivals at home and has struggled to expand overseas. After Mr. Ma faded from public view, a new generation of executives took over, adopting a lower profile while emphasizing Alibaba’s role within Beijing’s broader technology policies.

凭借横跨全球的电商业务，阿里巴巴跻身中国身价最高的企业之列。然而近年来，它在国内市场接连被低价竞争对手蚕食，海外扩张之路也举步维艰。马云淡出公众视野后，新一代高管接手，他们行事更为低调，着力强调阿里巴巴在北京整体科技战略中的角色定位。

“Alibaba is quite aware of its position as part of this team of national champions that are leading China’s charge in A.I.,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But also they have this huge responsibility to not repeat what they did before.”

“阿里巴巴深知自身作为国家队成员的地位——这些企业正引领中国在AI领域全力推进，”布鲁金斯学会研究员陈凯欣表示。“但他们也肩负着巨大责任，不能再重蹈覆辙。”

In hindsight, Alibaba had gradually laid the groundwork to become an A.I. heavyweight. As its online shopping and logistics businesses expanded, the company built data centers capable of processing vast volumes of customer data worldwide.

事后看来，阿里巴巴其实早已为成为人工智能巨头一步步打下了基础。随着网上购物和物流业务不断扩张，公司建立了能够处理全球海量客户数据的数据中心。

It also borrowed a page from Amazon, parlaying its e-commerce success and technological infrastructure into a major cloud computing business, giving Alibaba two essential ingredients for building artificial intelligence systems: data and computing power.

它还借鉴亚马逊的经验，将电商成功经验和技术基础设施转化为强大的云计算业务，由此掌握了构建人工智能系统的两大核心要素：数据与算力。

“Alibaba in many ways has been ahead of its time,” Mr. Chan said. “It made early bets in a lot of these areas that are now the hot topics.”

“阿里巴巴在很多方面都走在了时代前面，”陈凯欣说。“它在许多如今炙手可热的领域早早布局。”

Alibaba introduced its family of A.I. models, Qwen, in 2023 and quickly made them open source. When DeepSeek, an A.I. start-up, burst into the spotlight with claims that it had built a powerful model for a small fraction of the cost of Western competitors, global investors rushed to capitalize on the excitement around China’s open-source A.I.

阿里巴巴于2023年推出了通义千问这个人工智能模型系列，并很快将它们开源。当人工智能初创公司DeepSeek凭借“以远低于西方竞争对手的成本打造出强大模型”的说法迅速走红后，全球投资者纷纷涌入，押注中国开源AI概念的热潮。

China has made open-source technology a pillar of its drive to become an A.I. superpower. Nearly all of its leading A.I. systems are open source.

中国已将开源技术列为跻身人工智能强国战略的重要支柱，该国几乎所有领先的人工智能系统都是开源的。

By January, Qwen had become the world’s most downloaded open-source A.I. system. Its models were being downloaded about one million times a day, according to data from Hugging Face, which hosts many open-source A.I. projects.

到今年1月，通义千问已成为全球下载量最高的开源人工智能系统。根据托管众多开源人工智能项目的Hugging Face平台的数据，通义千问模型每天的下载量约为100万次。

But that reach has not translated into big money. In the first three months of this year, Alibaba reported $1.3 billion in revenue from A.I.-related products — less than 4 percent of its total revenue. That pales in comparison with the company’s plan to spend more than $55 billion by the end of next year to build out its A.I. infrastructure.

然而，如此广泛的覆盖范围并未带来丰厚的真金白银。今年一季度，阿里巴巴来自人工智能相关产品的营收为13亿美元，在总营收的占比不到4%。而且与公司计划在明年底前投入逾550亿美元建设人工智能基础设施的规模相比，这一数字显得微不足道。

The push to turn its open-source success into a profitable business has quietly fractured the team behind Qwen.

为了将开源取得的成功转化为可盈利的业务，通义千问团队内部已悄然出现裂痕。

In March, Lin Junyang, Qwen’s lead engineer, announced that he was leaving Alibaba. Several other key engineers left around the same time. Two people familiar with the team said it had become divided by disagreements over how best to commercialize Qwen.

今年3月，通义千问首席工程师林俊旸宣布离开阿里。与此同时，另外几位核心工程师也相继离职。两名知情人士透露，团队内部因如何才能最好地实现通义千问的商业化而产生了分歧。

Alibaba had long kept its largest, most advanced models proprietary, while releasing leading open-source models alongside them. Now, the company is signaling a broader shift away from widely used open-source models and toward closed ones that customers must pay to use. In April alone, Alibaba released three proprietary models within days of one another.

阿里巴巴长期以来一直将其最大、最先进的模型保持为闭源，同时发布领先的开源模型。如今，公司正释放出更广泛的战略转向信号：从广泛使用的开源模型转向需要付费使用的闭源模型。仅在4月份，阿里巴巴就在数天内连续发布了三款闭源模型。

The Qwen team remains focused on keeping pace with the leading models coming out of Silicon Valley, but there is a growing recognition that technological leadership will not be enough if the company doesn’t make money, said a member of Alibaba’s A.I. research lab, which includes the Qwen team and others, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss internal matters.

阿里巴巴人工智能研究实验室的一名成员表示，通义千问团队仍专注于跟上硅谷领先模型的步伐，但团队内部越来越意识到，如果公司无法赚钱，仅仅保持技术领先是不够的。由于无权公开讨论内部事务，这名知情人士要求匿名。阿里巴巴人工智能研究实验室包括通义千问团队及其他多个团队。

The challenge for Alibaba is apparent in its stock price. While A.I.-related stocks have surged in markets worldwide, Alibaba’s stock has fallen 37 percent this year in Hong Kong, where the broader market has declined 12 percent.

阿里巴巴面临的挑战也反映在股价上。尽管全球各地与人工智能相关的股票纷纷上涨，但阿里巴巴在香港上市的股票今年已下跌37%，而同期香港大盘跌幅为12%。

Building a top-performing A.I. model is expensive, requiring enormous investments in hangar-size data centers filled with computer chips that consume copious amounts of electricity.

打造一个性能领先的人工智能模型成本极其高昂，需要投入巨资建设如飞机库般大小的数据中心，里面密集布置大量芯片，而这些芯片又是电力消耗的巨兽。

Chinese A.I. companies face an additional hurdle: U.S. export controls limit their access to the most advanced chips. China’s leading A.I. start-ups and researchers routinely say shortages of computing power are the biggest thing holding them back, and they are spending heavily to secure it.

中国人工智能企业还面临着额外障碍：美国的出口管制限制了它们获得最先进芯片的渠道。中国领先的人工智能初创企业和研究人员经常表示，算力短缺是制约它们发展的最大因素，因此它们正投入巨资来获取算力。

Those exorbitant costs are heaping financial pressure on Chinese A.I. companies. Start-ups like MiniMax and Z.ai have gone public to raise money from investors, and Alibaba is increasingly steering customers toward proprietary models even if that strategy upsets some of its top talent.

这些高昂的成本正给中国的人工智能企业带来财务压力。稀宇科技和智谱AI等初创企业纷纷上市，向投资者寻求融资，阿里巴巴也在加快引导客户转向闭源模型，尽管这一策略让公司的部分核心人才感到不满。

“It is a tough choice to make, and one that every open-model lab has to make at some point,” said Kevin Xu, the founder of Interconnected Capital, a hedge fund that invests in A.I. technologies.

“这是一个艰难的选择，也是每一家开源模型实验室迟早都必须面对的选择，”投资人工智能技术的对冲基金Interconnected Capital创始人徐凯文表示。

Alibaba’s A.I. business faces mounting external challenges. The Pentagon recently placed the company on a blacklist of firms that it says support the Chinese military, a designation that Alibaba argues has already harmed its business. In a statement, Alibaba said it was not affiliated with the Chinese military.

阿里巴巴的人工智能业务面临日益增长的外部挑战。美国国防部最近将该公司列入一份黑名单，称其支持中国军方。阿里巴巴则表示，这一认定已经损害了公司的业务，它在声明中强调，公司与中国军方没有任何关联。

Anthropic and OpenAI have also accused Chinese companies, including Alibaba, of improperly harvesting data from their A.I. systems to accelerate the development of their models.

Anthropic和OpenAI还指责包括阿里巴巴在内的中国企业不当抓取其人工智能系统的数据，以加速自身模型的研发。

Last month, Anthropic sent a letter to Senators Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, accusing Alibaba of “brazenly” and “illicitly” trying to copy its technology using 24,000 fraudulent accounts. Alibaba declined to comment on the allegations.

上月，Anthropic致函南卡罗来纳州共和党参议员蒂姆·斯科特和马萨诸塞州民主党参议员伊丽莎白·沃伦，指控阿里巴巴利用2.4万个虚假账户，“公然”试图“非法”复制其技术。阿里巴巴拒绝就上述指控发表评论。

Many in the technology industry compare today’s A.I. boom to the early days of the dot-com era, when internet companies were flourishing but no one had yet figured out how to build durable businesses around the technology.

科技行业的许多人都将当前的人工智能热潮与互联网早起的泡沫时代相提并论。当时互联网公司蓬勃发展，但没有人真正找到围绕这项技术建立可持续商业模式的方法。

Richard Lin, a vice president at the Silicon Valley company Datastrato who has long been involved in China’s open-source community, said China’s leading A.I. companies were all fighting for survival.

硅谷公司Datastrato副总裁、长期活跃于中国开源社区的林旅强表示，中国领先的人工智能企业目前都在为生存而战。

“There isn’t an A.I. company with a sustainable business model right now,” he said. “It’s not a healthy industry.”

“目前还没有一家人工智能企业拥有可持续的商业模式，”他说。“这不是一个健康的行业。”