Ant Group

2025.04.25

14:05

Ant Group's "Plan A" special project recruits the world's top AI talents to increase investment in the field of AGI

On April 25, Ant Group announced the launch of the "Plan A" AI talent program, recruiting top AI master's and doctoral graduates from world-class universities to strengthen R&D investment in the field of AGI (general artificial intelligence). The first recruitment presentation was held at the ICLR 2025 Summit in Singapore. Ant Group CTO He Zhengyu said at the meeting that Ant will firmly invest in AGI technology and work with the industry to solve the problem of AI universal access. World-class problems require world-class talents. For top talents, we only have Plan A, not Plan B.

2025.04.21

15:51

Ant Group establishes dual centers in Guangzhou

On April 21, during the Canton Fair, the "dual centers" of Ant South China Digital Operation Center and WorldFirst Cross-border Trade Operation Center were officially opened in Pazhou. It is reported that in May 2024, the Guangzhou Municipal People's Government and Ant Technology Group Co., Ltd. signed a strategic cooperation agreement, which clearly stated that they would deepen cooperation in the fields of digital finance, cross-border payment, and technological innovation. At the same time, WorldFirst, a subsidiary of Ant International, has also continued to increase its investment in the Chinese market, setting up a cross-border trade operation center in Guangzhou at the same time, forming a "dual center" strategic layout with the South China Digital Operation Center, and fully promoting the high-quality development of the Bay Area's digital economy.

2025.04.14

09:07

Focusing on green and smart travel, Ant Group, Hello and CATL reached a strategic cooperation

On April 10, Ant Group, Hello and CATL officially signed a strategic cooperation agreement. Based on their core advantages in digital technology, new energy technology and shared travel ecology, the three parties will carry out in-depth cooperation in four major directions: green smart travel, digital technology, green operations and green investment, and jointly promote the intelligent upgrading of the new energy industry and the construction of an ecological system.

2025.04.12

11:32

Xu Peng, Vice President of Ant Group and former head of the basic large model, resigned

Xu Peng, vice president of Ant Group and former head of the basic large model, has resigned. Xu Peng has been engaged in technical research in the field of artificial intelligence. He worked at Google for 11 years, responsible for and led the core technology research and development of Google Translate, and participated in the algorithm research and development of Google's display advertising system. Previously, Ant established NextEvo, an AI innovation research and development and application department, with Xu Peng as the head, responsible for all core technology research and development of Ant AI, including all research and development work of the Ant Lark large model.

2025.04.08

19:56

Ant Financial announces that its overseas headquarters will be located in Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government's Key Enterprise Introduction Office (Key Enterprise Introduction Office) held a signing ceremony for the fourth batch of key enterprise partners on April 8. Among them, Ant Digits, a digital technology company under Ant Group, became a "key enterprise partner" of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government and announced that its overseas headquarters will be located in Hong Kong. Ant Digits CEO Zhao Wenbiao said, "Hong Kong is the bridgehead for Ant Digits' global layout. In the future, we will use Hong Kong as a hub to build joint laboratories with local universities; at the same time, relying on Hong Kong's financial ecology, we will consolidate the Web3 compliance technology foundation and help digital assets circulate efficiently."

2025.04.01

14:00

Ant Group and China Mobile reportedly plan to invest in Yushu Technology

Reporters learned that robot unicorn company Yushu Technology plans to introduce new investors, including Ant Group and China Mobile, and is currently negotiating specific investment shares. People familiar with the matter said that this round of financing is not a complete new round of financing, but a small number of shares are opened to specific investors. Ant and Yushu have been negotiating and communicating about investment matters for a long time, and the valuation of this financing has not increased compared to 8 billion yuan. A FA (financial advisor) person close to Yushu Technology said that the valuation of this financing is less than 10 billion yuan.

2025.03.27

16:31

Longfor Group and Ant Group reached a strategic cooperation to explore new "touch" service experience

Longfor Group and Ant Group signed a strategic cooperation agreement. Both parties will be committed to exploring innovative applications of Alipay's "touch" technology in commercial scenarios. In the future, Longfor Group will gradually launch "touch" payment and digital services in Longfor Tianjie Shopping Centers across the country. Consumers only need to touch the device lightly, without opening the Alipay APP, to complete safe and convenient payment.

2025.03.26

15:19

Ant responds to recent share reduction: improving capital utilization efficiency, laying out newer and earlier opportunities

On March 26, in response to Ant Group's reduction of holdings in Obbec and Yonganxing, Ant Group said, "In the past few years, our new investments have focused on cutting-edge technology and globalization. In response to this strategy, we have reduced holdings in some projects that have been held for a long time and have obtained good returns, which can improve the efficiency of capital use and make arrangements for newer and earlier opportunities." After reducing holdings in the two A-share listed companies, Ant Group has accumulated a return on investment of more than 775 million yuan. At the same time, since last year, Ant Group has also increased its investment in the field of AI.

2025.03.25

20:36

Zhejiang Provincial Government and Alibaba Group's Ant Group Sign Strategic Cooperation Agreement

On the afternoon of the 25th, the Zhejiang Provincial Government signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Alibaba Group and Ant Group. Governor Liu Jie witnessed the signing with Alibaba Group Chairman Joseph Tsai and Ant Group Chairman Jing Xiandong. According to the agreement, the provincial government, Alibaba Group and Ant Group will focus on "taking high-quality development as the primary task, narrowing the 'three major gaps' as the main direction, reform and innovation as the fundamental driving force, and meeting the people's needs for a better life as the fundamental purpose", further integrating resources, closely coordinating, promoting the healthy development of the platform economy, cooperating in areas such as artificial intelligence, better serving the practice of Chinese-style modernization in the province, and jointly promoting the implementation of major national strategies. On behalf of the provincial government, Vice Governor Lu Shan signed agreements with Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming and Ant Group CEO Han Xinyi.

2025.03.24

14:34

Ant Group, a major breakthrough in AI, its large model can be efficiently trained on low-performance devices using domestic GPUs

Recently, the Ling team of Ant Group published a technical achievement paper. The paper shows that Ant Group has launched two MoE large language models of different sizes - Ling-Lite and Ling-Plus. The former has a parameter scale of 16.8 billion (2.75 billion activation parameters), and the Plus base model has a parameter scale of up to 290 billion (28.8 billion activation parameters). The performance of both models has reached the industry-leading level. In addition to the self-developed large model with leading performance, the biggest breakthrough of this technical paper is that it proposes a series of innovative methods to improve the efficiency and accessibility of AI development in resource-constrained environments. Experiments show that its 300 billion parameter MoE (mixed expert) large model can be efficiently trained on low-performance devices using domestic GPUs, and its performance is comparable to dense models and MoE models of the same scale that use NVIDIA chips entirely.

12:16

Ant Group uses domestic chips to reduce the cost of training AI models by 20%

Ant Group has successfully used domestic chips including those from Alibaba and Huawei, combined with a mixed expert (MoE) machine learning method, to train artificial intelligence (AI) models, reducing costs by about 20%. Test results show that the technology is comparable to the performance of Nvidia's H800 chip. Although Ant Group is still using Nvidia chips for AI development, its latest models have mainly relied on alternatives including AMD and Chinese domestic chips. A research paper released by Ant Group this month showed that some of its models surpassed Meta in certain benchmarks, but the data has not been independently verified. This shows that Ant Group is accelerating the localization of AI technology to reduce costs and reduce dependence on high-end chips from the United States.

2025.03.11

17:31

Shanghai Pudong officially announced: Alibaba has entered the embodied intelligence and robotics business

Shanghai Ant Lingbo Technology Co., Ltd. held an unveiling ceremony in Pudong, Shanghai. Ant Lingbo Technology is the main carrier for Ant Group to expand its embodied intelligence and robotics business, and is committed to creating industry-leading robotics products in the fields of home, elderly care, medical care and health. This landing will help Pudong build an embodied intelligence innovation highland led by humanoid robots and an innovative industrial ecosystem with industry influence. Previously, Ant Group has announced that its registered Shanghai Ant Lingbo Technology Co., Ltd. will focus on embodied intelligence technology and product research and development. In the future, Ant Group will continue to deploy and increase investment in AI.

2025.02.26

11:00

18 Ant Group technical papers were included in the AAAI 2025 AI conference

On February 25th, local time, AAAI2025 was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. The conference lasted for 8 days and ended on March 4th. AAAI is hosted by the International Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and is one of the top international academic conferences in the field of artificial intelligence. It is held once a year. AAAI2025 received a total of 12,957 valid submissions, 3,032 of which were accepted, with an acceptance rate of 23.4%. Among them, oral accounts for 4.6%. Ant Group was included in 18 papers, including 3 orals and 15 posters. The research areas involved enhancing privacy protection of large models, improving reasoning speed and reasoning ability, improving the efficiency of large model training, and reducing model hallucinations.

09:04

Matrix Holdings: The company won the bid for the second phase of Ant Group's global headquarters project. The company will work with Ant Group to create the interior design project for 10 buildings including the project's visitor center, office building, and activity center.

2025.02.19

16:21

Ant Group enters the embodied intelligence market, Obbec hits the daily limit several times, staff respond to cooperation

On February 19, Obbec-UW opened in the afternoon and rose sharply, hitting the daily limit several times during the session. On the news front, the official recruitment website of Ant Group showed that from December last year to February this year, the company opened multiple positions in the field of embodied intelligence, including algorithm engineers, R&D engineers, AI perception hardware experts, and whole machine/hardware product experts. The reporter called Obbec as an investor to inquire about the supply of Ant Group. The staff said that the company has provided Ant Group with biometric related products (face payment products). When asked whether it would supply humanoid robot products, the staff said that they did not know much about it.

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