Dr. Wang Jian’s Keynote on AI, AI+, and AI Infrastructure at the 2024 Inclusion·Bund Conference

At the 2024 Inclusion·Bund Conference, Dr. Wang Jian—academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, director of Zhejiang Lab, and founder of Alibaba Cloud—delivered a comprehensive speech on AI, AI+, and AI infrastructure.

He began by noting that AI has a long conceptual past but a very short practical history, emphasizing that the modern AI era truly began around 2017 with the introduction of the Transformer model, which sparked a rapid resurgence of interest and industrial impact.

Wang reviewed early milestones, from Turing’s 1940s "Intelligent Machinery" article and the Dartmouth workshop to the early neural‑network research of the 1980s, highlighting how the scale and capabilities of models have exploded since those early days.

He explained that today’s AI breakthroughs—ChatGPT, AlphaFold, and related applications—are all built on the same Transformer foundation, and that the concept of AI+ represents more than simply adding a domain to AI; it signifies a new platform paradigm akin to the original iPhone ecosystem.

The speaker stressed that the rapid growth in data, model size, and compute power demands a dedicated AI infrastructure, which he likens to the evolution of cloud computing as the underlying platform for modern AI services.

Using examples from leading AI unicorns, Wang illustrated how major cloud providers (including Alibaba Cloud) underpin these companies, and he argued that both technological innovation and novel organizational mechanisms (such as OpenAI’s hybrid nonprofit‑for‑profit structure) are essential for continued progress.

Concluding, Wang asserted that simultaneous revolutions in AI technology, innovation mechanisms, and infrastructure are creating the future, and that understanding and building AI infrastructure will be key to shaping that future.