Chao News Client | Reporter: Zhu Yao
On March 3, as the first stop for Alibaba's work in the new year, Jack Ma, along with the core management teams of Alibaba and Ant Group, visited Hangzhou Yungu School.
According to the Yungu School WeChat official account, attendees included Alibaba Group Chairman Joe Tsai, CEO Eddie Wu, Risk Committee Chairman Shao Xiaofeng, CEO of Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group Jiang Fan, as well as Ant Group Chairman Eric Jing and CEO Han Xinyi. It can be said that this rare full gathering of core management reflects the high priority Alibaba Group and Ant Group place on the development of AI.
What did Jack Ma discuss at Yungu School? Here, Ma and the core management team engaged in an open discussion with the principals and teachers regarding the challenges and opportunities brought by AI.
Jack Ma stated that the AI era has arrived rapidly, and its impact on society exceeds imagination. "None of us are sufficiently prepared, but for teenagers, they hold the greatest hope and opportunity for change," he noted. He mentioned that the purpose of this visit to Yungu School was to share Alibaba's increasingly clear insights into AI with the teachers.
Currently, AI iterations are measured in weeks, and its capabilities are constantly growing. The transformation brought by this technological revolution to production efficiency and all aspects of society is historic. In the future, people might not need to work eight hours a day, and social wealth will be vastly abundant, but many types of jobs will disappear. Ma stated: "The reason we all came to Yungu together is to tell everyone that this change will come very quickly. We must make changes rapidly to help children learn to coexist with AI starting now and adapt to this massive shift."
Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai said that in the AI era, critical thinking skills are crucial. Critical thinking is not just about asking questions, but asking the right questions. In the future, machines will be able to do many things, but the ability to communicate—both between humans and machines, and between humans and humans—may become one of the most important skills.
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu believes that the future distinction between humans and machines lies in three things: curiosity, empathy, and physical strength. Curiosity determines that humans will spontaneously undertake tasks, whereas machines are passive; empathy represents the understanding of people; and when mental labor is replaced by AI, physical strength will become crucial, so sports and physical education will become increasingly important.
Ant Group Chairman Eric Jing stated that AI should be used to help humans perform trivial and repetitive tasks, allowing people more time to develop our unique human traits, such as aesthetics, creativity, and imagination. While making good use of AI, we must avoid letting it become a crutch we cannot discard; we must still retain the ability to think independently.
Jack Ma noted that while the impact of AI is immense, the opportunities are also vast. AI presents an opportunity for education to return to its essence. Time spent on rote memorization and endless test drills can be freed up to cultivate creativity and imagination. Children can have more time to play and to learn music, painting, and sports, through which they can learn to share, feel, experience, listen, and understand.
"To determine if a school belongs to the AI era, you don't look at how many AI servers it has or how strong its AI skills are," Ma said. He explained that while AI possesses "chips," humans possess "hearts." The greatest change AI brings to education is that teachers can now fully become "engineers of the human soul" rather than mere transmitters of knowledge. The future is not about children competing with AI in calculation and memory, but about children maintaining curiosity, learning empathy and responsibility, and gaining a sense of experience. Curiosity, imagination, creativity, judgment, and aesthetic ability are the true capabilities that education in the AI era needs to endow children with.
Alibaba is investing firmly in the AI sector, achieving a dual breakthrough during the Spring Festival. The performance of its new-generation large model, Qwen 3.5-Plus, rivals that of Gemini 3 Pro, while the Qwen App has leaped to become a national-level AI application. Recently, Alibaba's AI "Golden Triangle"—composed of Tongyi Laboratory, Alibaba Cloud, and T-Head (Pingtouge)—has surfaced for the first time. This combination possesses the full-stack self-developed chips of T-Head, Alibaba Cloud (ranked first in Asia-Pacific), and "Qwen," the world's strongest open-source model. Currently, Alibaba and Google are the only two technology companies in the world that possess top-tier capabilities across all three major fields: large models, cloud computing, and chips.
(Images provided by the interviewees)