On September 29th, according to media reports, Steven Hoi, a top AI scientist and IEEE Fellow from around the world, has joined Alibaba's Tongyi and turned to the research and development of the Tongyi Large Model. Xu Zhuhong has over 20 years of experience in the AI industry and academia. He is a tenured professor at Singapore Management University and a tenured associate professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He has published over 300 top academic papers in the field of AI, with more than 50000 citations. He was once named one of the top 1% of AI scientists in the world by Stanford University.
In February 2025, Xu Zhuhong joined Alibaba and served as Vice President of Alibaba Group and Chief Scientist of Intelligent Information Business Group. He reported to Wu Jia, President of Intelligent Information Business Group, and was responsible for the research and application of multimodal basic models and agents for AI To C business. According to its original positioning, Xu Zhuhong's core task is probably to build a top AI algorithm team, integrate internal resources such as Tongyi (application), Quark, Tmall Genie, etc., promote multimodal interaction product iteration, and accelerate the commercialization of AI To C. However, more than 7 months after joining Alibaba, it has been rumored that Xu Zhuhong has joined the Tongyi Laboratory team, which means he may shift from commercial research and development focused on AI To C to more fundamental and cutting-edge large-scale model development.
As a leading figure in the field of multimodal big models, Xu Zhuhong served as the Vice President of Salesforce, the world's largest enterprise software company, and built Salesforce's AI research ecosystem in Asia from scratch; He also founded HyperAGI, a multimodal AI startup in 2023, which can be said to be one of the few AI giants in the industry that integrates industry, academia, and research.
