Joseph Tsai: open source drives AI adoption; Qwen has released 470+ open models

On November 3, 2026, the World Internet Conference opened in Wuzhen, Zhejiang. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Joe Tsai, co-founder and chairman of Alibaba Group, said that demand for AI continues to climb while compute remains in short supply. He argued that open source is the only path to broad AI adoption, noting that it lowers development costs for small and medium-sized businesses and matters especially for developing countries. Tsai disclosed that Alibaba's Qwen family has already been open sourced in more than 470 models, with cumulative global downloads surpassing 4 billion and more than 330,000 derivative models.

The report also recaps earlier remarks. According to Bloomberg in October 2026, Tsai said that if Europe wants to avoid technological dependence on the United States and China, open source AI is its best option, and he called on Europe to build its own compute infrastructure for training and running models. Tsai has previously predicted that AI will shift from a visible talking point to hidden infrastructure, suggesting that within five years people may stop discussing AI as a standalone topic because it will be embedded in every part of business, much like the internet today. On the open source path taken by Chinese companies, he drew an analogy to top universities that open their doors worldwide and offer scholarships, arguing that AI progress should likewise be open sourced so more people benefit, and framing this as a philosophical choice by Chinese companies. No further developments beyond these statements are given in the available material.