The following content is purely my wild speculation and is not real. Don't take it seriously.

Regarding this departure of the Alibaba Qianwen team, I tend to think that previously, DeepSeek couldn't handle the traffic surge after going viral (referring to the period of frequent outages after its popularity spike, due to insufficient computing power and concurrency). A massive amount of that traffic got diverted to Qianwen and Doubao. At that time, because of this traffic wave, Qianwen's financial reports showed effective improvement, causing its stock price to soar.

Now, almost a year has slowly passed, and the traffic growth rate must have clearly declined. User retention is probably not as good as Doubao's either, because Doubao is deeply integrated with Douyin. So, the upcoming financial reports are going to look bad. The high-level executive (high P) in charge of AI starts racking his brains. The financial reports are being scrutinized by top shareholders and bigwigs, and the user data now looks poor too, worrying him so much he can't sleep at night.

Coincidentally, in the second half of last year, there was the food delivery war. Flash Purchase merged with Ele.me and, relying on burning money with red packet subsidies, snatched quite a few users from Meituan and JD.com. I don't know if the AI high P here was given a hint by someone or came up with it himself, but he directly reported to the top: 'I've thought of a great idea, but it requires burning money, just like the Flash Purchase line under Taotian.' The top management heard this: spend this little money, make the financial reports look good, and the stock price can make another wave? Approved. Release the funds.

And thus, the Spring Festival red packet event appeared.

However, this thing isn't like food delivery, where you can keep ordering from the same platform after finishing. I have no reason or habit to use AI, especially since many of those grabbing red packets were elderly uncles and aunties who are even less likely to use AI normally. Although the red packets could increase registered user numbers, the retention and usage data were very poor, completely failing to achieve the intended effect.

So the situation became tough. Money was burned, but the intended effect wasn't achieved. Someone had to take the blame. Although the high P referenced the Taotian line and had reported it, he certainly wasn't going to take the blame himself. So at this point, the lower-level execution manager (I guess he didn't really agree with the burn-money-red-packet strategy back then, plus he wasn't good at maintaining relationships normally) became the perfect scapegoat. He took the 3.25 rating. Although he wasn't fired, he's miserable. 'I disagreed from the start, I was just forced to execute. In the end, I took the blame for the organization, got a 3.25.' The tech guy was furious—how could he tolerate this? He left, taking his loyal subordinates with him. 'I'll do it myself, New Wo Hop Sing 🤪'

As a result, this news directly broke out, and now we have this situation.

$Alibaba(BABA.US)

$BABA-W(09988.HK)