--- title: "The prodigy has left. Will Alibaba fall behind in the AI era?" type: "Topics" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/topics/39079116.md" description: "If we look solely at the talent flow within Alibaba, the departure of the prodigy Lin Junyang may not be a bombshell. However, from the perspective of Alibaba's strategic advancement in the entire AI field, Lin Junyang's departure is the last straw that broke the market's confidence in Alibaba. It can be said that Alibaba's performance in the AI era does not match the market's expectations for it. Alibaba is even becoming more and more like Baidu in the mobile internet era, increasingly heading towards its own dead end. The first reason is, when ChatGPT emerged at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023..." datetime: "2026-03-05T09:19:24.000Z" locales: - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/topics/39079116.md) - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/topics/39079116.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/topics/39079116.md) author: "[岂可修62](https://longbridge.com/en/profiles/9797828.md)" --- # The prodigy has left. Will Alibaba fall behind in the AI era? If we look at it purely from the perspective of talent flow at Alibaba, the departure of prodigy Lin Junyang may not be a bombshell. However, from the perspective of Alibaba's strategic advancement in the entire AI field, Lin Junyang's departure was the final straw that broke the market's confidence in Alibaba. It can be said that Alibaba's performance in the AI era does not match the market's expectations for it. Alibaba is even becoming more and more like Baidu in the mobile internet era, increasingly walking into its own dead end. The first reason is that when ChatGPT emerged at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, Alibaba, as a globally leading technology company, did not keep up with overseas giants in its understanding of AI. Although Alibaba launched the Qwen large model in the first half of 2023 to follow the market rhythm, at the same time, Baidu's ERNIE Bot (what it's called isn't important), Tencent's Hunyuan, ByteDance's Doubao, and other large models bloomed like a hundred flowers. If domestic "tech" companies were forced into developing large models, then in the subsequent strategic evolution of AI, the major domestic players represented by Alibaba gradually began to change. First is Doubao, which focuses on individual users. It started with content, so it is not unfamiliar with the consumer market. Through several efforts in 2024, Doubao finally captured the minds of ordinary users and became synonymous with AI tools. In comparison, Tencent seems somewhat more "sluggish." Cloud services account for a quarter of the company's revenue, so whether it succeeds in the AI era will only affect the company by a quarter in the short term. Tencent's core business is still in gaming and social networking. But Alibaba is different; cloud services have always been its driving force. As a leading cloud service provider domestically, expectations for Alibaba Cloud are still very high. Looking at the situation overseas, Amazon is surging ahead with AWS, Microsoft is thriving because of its investment in OpenAI, Google's own large models are getting better and better, and even Oracle is experiencing a second spring thanks to AI services. Since Alibaba is a domestic leader, it cannot back down. This situation became even more severe after Deepseek emerged. Although Qwen consistently ranks at the top in various evaluations, and Qwen has a certain reputation among users, perhaps the 2025 "red envelope war" diverted Alibaba's strategic focus. In the third year of the AI era, what Alibaba produces always gives people the feeling of "is that it?" Compared to the continuous iteration of overseas computing power, during the 2026 Spring Festival, the top three domestic tech giants used Yuanbao, Doubao, and Qwen to wage a "red envelope war," cumulatively distributing tens of billions to C-end users. The products of the three companies may not have left a deep impression on anyone, but it's likely that many users were collecting red envelopes while cursing the idiocy. Whether it was Yuanbao's function of collecting red envelopes or Qwen's milk tea, the functions were indeed used, but they didn't feel very AI. In contrast, the Doubao phone at the end of 2025 brought a feeling of "eye-opening," but unfortunately, it didn't last long. While ClawBot over there has already started killing it 7\*24 hours, these domestic tech giants are still desperately trying to scrape wool and buy traffic. No wonder the trends of domestic and foreign tech companies have diverged since the National Day holiday in 2025. The Hang Seng Tech Index gets beaten up every day. Watching the semiconductor industry in Japan and South Korea rise and fall dramatically, watching domestic hardware companies double, triple, and quintuple in value, watching gold and silver continuously hit historical highs, have companies like Alibaba, Tencent Holdings, Meituan, JD.com, and Kuaishou already lost their competitiveness? Or will these companies gradually be replaced in the AI landscape? The continuous decline in Alibaba's stock price is still greatly related to the company's management culture and business trends. If Alibaba continues to compete in the AI era with the management model and team culture of the previous generation, I'm afraid they will continuously lose their original advantages. In the internet and mobile internet eras, Baidu, once famous for its technology, gradually fell behind. Its current valuation in both Hong Kong and US stocks is around 10 times PE, basically similar to manufacturing companies. At the end of 2025, there were reports of 30% layoffs at Baidu. If things evolve this way, I'm afraid the company that falls behind in the AI era will become Alibaba. Neither Alibaba Cloud, Qwen, nor T-Head can save Alibaba from its intense internal struggles and backward corporate culture. ### Related Stocks - [09988.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/09988.HK.md) - [BABA.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/BABA.US.md) - [89988.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/89988.HK.md) - [00700.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/00700.HK.md) - [TCTZF.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/TCTZF.US.md) - [80700.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/80700.HK.md) - [TCEHY.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/TCEHY.US.md) - [ORCL.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/ORCL.US.md) - [01024.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/01024.HK.md) - [81024.HK](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/81024.HK.md) - [KBAB.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/KBAB.US.md) - [BABO.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/BABO.US.md) - [BABX.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/BABX.US.md) - [HBBD.SG](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/HBBD.SG.md) - [HTCD.SG](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/HTCD.SG.md) - [ORCL-D.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/ORCL-D.US.md)