This week’s podcast is my watch list for what Alibaba is doing in AI Apps.

You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Here is the link to the TechMoat Consulting.

Here is the link to our Tech Tours.

I am watching:

• Qwen
• DingTalk
• Amap
• Quark

Plus,

• Accio and Aidge
• Tmall and Taobao
• Fliggy
• Youku and Wan

——–

Related articles:

• AutoGPT and Other Tech I Am Super Excited About (Tech Strategy – Podcast 162)
• AutoGPT: The Rise of Digital Agents and Non-Human Platforms & Business Models (Tech Strategy – Podcast 163)
• Why ChatGPT and Generative AI Are a Mortal Threat to Disney, Netflix and Most Hollywood Studios (Tech Strategy – Podcast 150)

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

• Generative AI

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

• Alibaba
• Alibaba Cloud
• Amap, DingTalk, Qwen, Quark, Fliggy

——Q&A for LLM

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Episode 275 – Alibaba.1

[00:00:00] Oh, welcome. Welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson, and this is the Tech Strategy podcast from TechMoat Consulting. And the topic for today, Alibaba’s eight big AI apps. Now I’ve been kind of all over Alibaba in terms of e-commerce meets ai, which is really their AI cloud division. But I mean, there are just projects everywhere.

I’ve written decent number of articles about this. I got another couple coming on Alibaba Cloud infrastructure, their chips and all that. But I thought I would sort of bubble it up to like, okay, what are the apps I think are really important that I’m paying attention to? Yeah, there, there’s kind of four, but there’s actually eight, that I’m, I’ve got my eye on that I think are kind of the frontier of how you think about ai.

Plus, E-commerce and also just sort of ai when you have a massive ecosystem of multiple services like Alibaba does. And honestly, I don’t know anyone who’s close to them. I, I mean, Amazon’s good, but they aren’t at [00:01:00] this level. I think they’re kind of the best at this in the world, or at least the most aggressive and the most far-reaching.

So, I’m going to go through, sort of bubble that up into like, look, these are the eight apps I’m keeping my eye on. Um. They’re all pretty cool. So hopefully today will be a bunch of cool stuff. I think it’s cool. Anyways, that’ll be the topic for today.   let’s see. Housekeeping stuff, if you can, um. Leave a review for this podcast.

I would appreciate it. A good review is better than a bad one, but any review, well, I shouldn’t say any review. If you could leave a positive review that, that would, that’s a more direct request. That would be much appreciated. That helps a lot. Easy to do. Standard disclaimer or nothing in this podcast to my writing a website is investment advice.

The numbers and information for me and any guess may be incorrect. The views and opinions you express may no longer be relevant or accurate. Overall, investing is risky. This is not investment, legal, or tax advice. Do your own research. And with that, let’s get into the topic. Well, the concept for today, obviously [00:02:00] generative ai, but really generative AI plus e-commerce, which I think is a huge deal.

I mean, it’s, and, and that’s not even getting into ai. I mean, I kind of say generative ai. Really what we’re talking about is AI agents, like I, I break the whole digital world into two big buckets. There’s sort of digital strategy, digital businesses, digital transformation. And that really includes sort of old school predictive machine learning that’s been around forever algorithms.

And then there’s sort of AI agents, which is both generative AI and also agentic ai. Well, AI agent e-commerce is, it’s just a huge deal. Freaks me out. I’m working on an article. I’ll send that out in the next two days. Basically, about the seven. It’s literally, at least on my draft, it’s the seven things that freak me out about ai e-commerce that I’m worried about.

So, I’ll send that out. But yeah, it’s, it’s a big deal. So that’s going to be the topic for today. Not a big surprise. And, you know, I went to Alibaba back in [00:03:00] November. I’ve been there quite a few times this, this last year. Not just, you know, Alibaba’s in Hangzhou, but then you got there, you got Cainiao, um, kind of bouncing around to all of them a lot this year.

Actually, this was. You know, sometimes you make plans and they don’t really work or sometimes they make plans and you do ’em, but they don’t pay off. And I sent out about a year ago, I said I was going to try and become one of the experts on the cloud companies of China. cause really you’re talking about AI Cloud.

That’s where the action is. It’s, there’s other AI companies outside of that, of course, but I mean these AI cloud companies are really kind of the center of the universe in that subject. So, I kind of set out, I’m going to try and be the expert on this or one of them. And I told, and I told Huawei this, I told Baidu this, I told Tencent, I told, I’m like, look, I’m going to try and be the guy.

And that was a year ago, and it actually kind of worked out. I’ve, I’ve spent a decent amount of time at all four of those companies, they’re cloud divisions because those are really the, the ones to watch in China. And really increasingly [00:04:00] Asia, just digging into it as much as I can and getting smart about it.

I think I’m getting, I’m think I’m in good shape. Like I feel like I really made some good progress. Maybe in another year I think I’ll, you know, I’ll, I’ll really be where I want to be. But anyways, that worked out pretty well, which is nice, I don’t know, not surprise, but it’s a nice result. Alright, let me go through sort of.

The simplest AI app is QWEN, which is just, you know, their standard all-purpose AI super assistant, right? That’s chat GBT, that’s Google, Gemini, or you know, it’s Microsoft, you know, co-pilot, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s this new Uber ultimate interface. For a consumer, a user, it could be a business as well, that accesses all the generative AI tools, which are rapidly increasing and improving.

And also sort of, you know, as it’s sort of now the front of the queue [00:05:00] for how people access the internet, it, it really becomes kind of the gatekeeper and the, the, the main doorway. So, you can go into ChatGPT and just start making purchases right in ChatGPT. So, it’s tying into e-commerce. You can go on Google Gemini and it’ll, you know, read your emails for you.

So, it’s sort of a doorway into email.   you can have it give you directions. I mean Okay. Their version of sort of AI assistant, the AI super assistant is Qwen, um, which stands for Togi   Chen, but that’s not a good name. cause they’re really international with this. So, they, they did it to Qwen and anyone can do it.

You don’t have to be in China. There’s a website.   you can just go and use and start using it. Just like ChatGPT. It’s free.   I’ll put the link in the show notes. It’s great. You can do it in English. You don’t have to speak Chinese. It works really well in English. You can use it anywhere in the world.

cause Alibaba, unlike these other companies I mentioned, mostly they’re going international. They [00:06:00] don’t want to just be a China AI company. They want to be right up there with Google and open ai and Microsoft and AWS, they’re going for everything across the board, every country, every type of tool. It’s pretty ambitious actually.

You know, they have got this big growing suite of, you know, things this can do. It’s multimodal now. It didn’t used to be. It can do natural language processing, it can do image generation, it can do all of this. And okay, you know, this is going to be one of their primary AI gateways for their consumers, for Alibaba consumers.

Now they have a couple of others. I think they’re kind of plays in multiple bets, but this is obviously the one people know the most. And big surprise, if you’re using Qwen, you can then access other aspects of the Alibaba ecosystem so you can shop on Taobao through there. It’s still being developed.

It’s not there yet, but it’s, it’s, you can see where it’s going. You can book travel on Fliggy, either travel site, you can pay with Alipay, [00:07:00] and in theory you can do all of that without leaving sort of the Qwen Chat interface. Okay. We see that in other places in the world. So, nothing surprising there.

They’re moving into agents very quickly. So, if last year was all about, you know, generative ai, put in a question, get a response, now it’s going to be like, just execute for me. Um, pretty interesting. Make a reservation for me, buy me some milk till you have it delivered. So, they’re moving into agents there pretty quick.

Alright, app number one, not a big surprise. We’ve seen these other places. Not terribly unique to Alibaba, but very cool. Um, alright, let’s get to one. I think people don’t know. Number two, DingTalk Now I like DingTalk. I think it’s really pretty cool. This was Alibaba’s response to WeChat. You know, back 2013, 2014, WeChat is everywhere dominating China for C2C person to person messaging and [00:08:00] B2C, you know, communicating with businesses and then they quickly pivoted into if you can send messages between people, you can send money between people.

That’s WeChat pay. Obviously, it took over. They tried to go outside of China. It was like 2000 13, 14, 15 didn’t really work. They tried to go to Europe; some other places it didn’t take line and WhatsApp and others took over.   but at the same time, Alibaba wanted to get in this space, but they couldn’t really compete there.

I mean, the network effects on this are two powerful. You know, this is sort of a winner take all business. You really don’t see oligopolies or duopoly when it comes to Messenger. It’s really one company that gets it all. WhatsApp. It is the only one people use. I mean, you can sort of say Facebook messenger’s in there and Instagram messenger’s in there.

X has got a little messenger, but for just sort of daily communication, it’s pretty much a monopoly. Okay. So, they pivoted into enterprise. Let’s focus on helping do communication messaging between employees at a company, [00:09:00]   sort of like Slack, but more Messenger based. And it did quite well. Um. And then you can see over time that enterprise services from their sort of expand, you start, you know, you begin with Messenger and then you start doing things like,   document collaboration, meeting coordination, other tools, you know, just like on sort of standard Microsoft stuff, that Microsoft Teams becomes the portal by which a lot of other services.

So same sort of story there. Okay. But now they’re plugging AI into Ding Talk. Um. Pretty aggressively. Um, and you know, if you’re doing a lot of commerce stuff, because they have a huge number of merchants that use their services. When you look at how sort of Alibaba Cloud expands, let’s say from China into Malaysia, you see a lot of traction within merchants who are already selling on Alibaba’s e-commerce platform.

So those are ones that often will sign up for Alibaba Cloud. [00:10:00] Okay, so if you’re doing a messenger thing like this and you’re dialing AI more and more into Enterprise Messenger, you’re going to see a lot of traction with brands and merchants that sell on the Alibaba e-commerce sites. Not a big surprise. Um, yeah.

It’s sort of becoming, I don’t know what the way it’s described is it’s kind of going from a simple Messenger app to more of an enterprise services thing, which has been happening and now it’s going to. The term they hear is agent operating system. Now, this is an interesting idea. I think you could say AI operating system or agent operating system.

Now, this is something Elon Musk has talked about, which is pretty interesting idea. The argument is we may not have operating systems in the future like Android or iOS. They may be there behind the scenes, but we won’t use them. You know, you go onto your smartphone and you, you’re in the operating system.

AOS windows on your [00:11:00] PC and you will click between various apps and then go do what you need to do. Maybe you open Word, maybe you send a message, maybe you check an email, whatever. If your primary interface is now just sort of a super AI assistant, you will just tell it what to do and it will go into the apps on its own.

We might not need to see those. So, the argument is, look, maybe there won’t be operating systems on our smartphones because we’re not really looking at the screens that much anymore. We’ll just talk to it. And if that’s true, maybe a smartphone doesn’t even have to look like a smartphone with a screen.

Maybe it could just be an earpiece and we just talk to our assistant and we can tell it what to go do. Maybe it puts the little LED on glasses or on a watch or something. Anyways, that was what he was kind of saying, and I’m not sure I really buy that. I kind of buy it on the enterprise side, like I think, I mean, there’s hundreds of thousands of apps out there, right?

So, we want to look at screens and we want to do things. I don’t like shopping by voice. I don’t [00:12:00] find that very fun. I like its visual, so I don’t necessarily buy it for consumers, but I think if you’re a worker in a business. Maybe you’re a white collar, maybe you’re a factory guy. The idea that, you know, we’ve been giving these people smart tools and handheld devices for years, which basically have operating systems and screens.

If you’re just talking to someone and then, it’s sort of doing it for you, the suite of apps you’re going to use is much smaller. I kind of buy that this sort of agent operating system or AI operating system could be a way that you interact with your enterprise services of various types, send messages, collaborate on documents, file your expense reports, you know, all that stuff.

Yeah, we could see an agent operating system taking over there. I kind of buy that. So, this is okay. DingTalk. You know, if. Qwen is about, look, we want to be the front door to the internet for consumers Alibaba B2C. Okay. DingTalk kind of wants to be the front door within a business. [00:13:00] Okay, that’s an interesting idea.

Here’s some more details on that.   those of you who are subscribers, I sent you a pretty decent article on a lot of this. Not all of it, I think. Um, okay. So, it’s an AI assistant, that’s where it’ll start and maybe it becomes an agent operating system. And what you can do is if you’re having a chat or you’re dealing with your phone, you just put in a prompt and it can call in the AI assistant to answer.

So, if I’m chatting with you and a messenger, me, me and five people have a messenger group. We’re talking about some project within the company. You can just hit a back slash and the AI assistant will come in and engage in the conversation.   that’s pretty neat. So, WeChat just did that actually. Um.

Last week, Yuan Bao, which is, which is sort of one of the AI assistants for Tencent. They just added Yuan Bao Pai, which is basically what I just talked about. If you’re having a chat group with five or 10 people there, it’s now got an AI assistant as a member of the chat, and you can have it do things as part of the conversation.

This is the same idea, so okay. AI assistance to start and then you can start to move to agents and have it execute. And then they have the Ding Talk AI marketplace, the Ding Talk Agent marketplace. Really? I wrote about this about a year ago when it was first announced, and then it kind of disappeared.

But the idea is like, okay, not only are you going to have agents that will do stuff for you, DingTalk will be an agent. It’ll be DingTalk agent. They are also creating a marketplace where lots of businesses can create agents that you can basically access and buy and rent like a marketplace. That kind of makes sense.

Alibaba likes marketplaces, so you could have specialized AI agents that you could use as well. One for hr, one for legal, one for sales, and companies can basically hire them and put them as well. So, you know, it quickly [00:15:00] looks like a suite of agents, some of which might be DingTalk and others might be through the marketplace that are kind of operating in this system.

Okay. I kind of buy all of that. I’m waiting for it to happen. I’ve been waiting, looking, but. Yeah, that’s pretty cool. The other thing that I think is cool within DingTalk is putting AI and AI assistance, not probably agents into hardware. And I talked about this recently. There was a, a product unveiled that CES in Las Vegas, um, by Razer, you know, Razer, the cool gaming company, called Project Ava.

Where it’s basically a 3D hologram that sits on your desk. And instead of talking to your phone, if you have your AI assistant going, I use grok, I use Annie. Instead of talking to my phone where it’s got a little image of the person you’re talking, no, it’s a 3D hologram sitting on your desk and [00:16:00] you just talk to that.

So, you start to put the AI assistant in physical objects. So, the desk thing, I’m totally going to get it. It’s supposed to be released in a month or two. That’s on the list. You could put it into little robo dogs, like unit tree that run around. Not sure that’s a great idea, but it would be kind of fun. The humanoid robots, obviously they’re coming.

You could put it in cabinets, you could put it in, you know, if you’re in factories you could put it. Lots of places. So, this idea of embedding the AI systems in physical hardware, around the office, around the factory, that’s pretty cool actually. Anyways, that’s most of ding talk. The other part, the last part within that that’s kind of interesting is, okay, how would this integrate with the rest of the Alibaba ecosystem?

Okay. That’s pretty, I mean, it’s kind of what I just said. Like instead of using Qwen to buy something and have it delivered, this would be the same thing, but from the enterprise side, from the worker side. So, you know, let’s say you’re going to take a trip somewhere, [00:17:00] but it’s a business trip, not a personal trip.

So, you’d use Ding talk AI travel. It would pull up a map, their mapping system. It would buy your tickets, plan your route. It would pay for it with Alipay, it would then, let’s say it’s a three-day business trip. They would then generate all the necessary approvals, all the expense reimbursements, everything would be logged, it would book your flight.

That would be consistent with whatever your company policies are on business versus economy, blah, blah, blah. No manual receipts needed. So, you could sort of see this going into the greater ecosystem. But on the sort of enterprise side, as opposed to the consumer side, I think that’ll happen too. So that’s kind of number two.

I think DingTalk is neat. I like playing with DingTalk. Uh. All right. Third one. This one, I, this, this one I like a lot. So Amap, this is their mapping program like Google Maps, but   mostly in China. You can actually get it in Southeast Asia. I use Amap in Southeast [00:18:00] Asia because I don’t like Google Maps very much.

It always sends me down weird roads.   I find Amap pretty good. I just kind of go between the two of them. The route tends to be better. Now, this is interesting because, okay, they’ve got a map. It’s a typical mapping program like Google Maps. What happens when you add AI to that? Well, that’s when you start talking about spatial intelligence, that’s when the AI moves off your laptop and your phone and the internet, and it starts moving around the real world because it’s navigating maps.

So that’s when you start talking about things like building world maps. And moving out in the, you know, spatial intelligence is the way the phrase I keep hearing, um, mentioned. And you know, the idea is a m app will go from being a mapping service to something that kind of helps you navigate your physical world as you move around.

So, this is your app in the real world. Maybe the others are sort of apps on the internet [00:19:00] ethereal world, so stuff that they’re doing, which in, AMAP pretty cool.   shall go, which kind of means teacher, they have a shall g agent, basically. So instead of, you know, giving a little command and telling it, you know, map me, find destination A, choose the route.

Well, now it’s a conversation with an agent, basically. And of course, it’s all based on the Qwen Foundation models, which are getting better and better. Now, why is that better than a typical mapping service, the AI assistance that are sort of general? If you’ve, if you’ve been playing with them a lot, they have problems with sort of multi-step reasoning.

Like they forget, you know, the context window is a problem. So, you’re, you’re talking, you give it an instruction, you try and give it three instructions in one prompt. It doesn’t usually do it right. You kind of have to give it one and then get that and then give it the next well. This kind of, you know, cha gau, if you’re going to [00:20:00] move around the physical world, you’re starting to talk a lot about sort of multi-step prompts.

I need you to drive me to the airport, but on the way, I want you to stop at a coffee shop.   and I want to get, a latte and I need to be there by 2:00 PM Okay? That chain of logic, if you try and put that in a typical AI system like ChatGPT, it has difficulty. And you know, if you have a sort of specialized AI assistant, like shall go.

Okay. That’s kind of the idea. Proactive AI prompts are kind of an interesting idea; it’s kind of tracking you and it starts to just sort of predict your needs as you go. So, if it, I usually get coffee around 2:00 PM so wherever I’m walking, you know, it can chime in at 2:00 PM Hey, you want your coffee?

There’s a place two blocks to the left.   that’s pretty good. You haven’t been there before. Maybe you should try this one.   You know, you wake up in the morning, you don’t [00:21:00] really need to tell it, hey, I got to get up and get to work. It knows your kind of routine. It knows where you are. So, it, you know, you pop up, it immediately shows you, as you’re walking out of your apartment to the parking lot, the map to work shows up or the map to where you normally go, shows up.

If you’re taking the subway, it says, here’s the congestion, here’s the traffic. You might want to do the, oh, there’s a road closure. So, this sort of proactive assistant is, um. I don’t usually use that very much when I’m just looking at my laptop when it, it suggests like, hey, here’s an email response you could do.

I don’t like proactive things on my laptop or my phone very much walking around the real world. I think that’s an interesting idea.   a couple other things Amap is doing. It’s pretty neat what they’re doing.   as mentioned this, once you get into spatial intelligence, you know.

You start to talk about world modeling, and this was, I heard someone talk about this, um, [00:22:00] I forget her name. She’s a big AI thinker who’s just launched a new company, and she basically said, look, if you’re going to get to really high intelligence in these things, the path to that is probably not going to be predicting the next word in a paragraph.

Writing and speaking is one type of intelligence. Where you predict words and put them together in sentences, that’s not how we became intelligent. Our intelligence is based on walking around the real world, seeing things with our eyes, picking things up with our hands. That’s where most of our intelligence come from, and books and speaking is almost secondary to that.

So, the idea that these generative AI models, which are basically foundation models, you know, the foundation is text. No, he says, “look, you’re going to have to have something else as the foundational model, which is going to be, visual action, things like that. And that’s why everyone starts talking about world modeling, that, you [00:23:00] know, you can map the entire world and then people, an intelligence and AI assistant or a robot can train within the real world, which is difficult cause you don’t get enough data or can do it in the virtual creation, this world model.

So yeah, that’s going to be within. App basically. So simple versions, you can do 3D virtual tours. You know, street view is okay, but it’s much better. If there’s a restaurant where I want to go to, I can just open it up and walk through the thing in reality or on the screen. But you know, a world model will let you do that.

It’s way better than say, street. And, you know, you can do things like spatial intelligence. You can fly through various buildings, go up hallways, go through staircases, all of that. You know that that’s a major upgrade from photos of the world. So, they’re going to do that. They call it Street, flying Street View.

Here’s one I like Beyond the Horizon navigation. They’re tying a [00:24:00] map in with the Chinese satellite system Beidou and. So, they’re starting to pull that information down and combine it on Amap. So basically, if you’re driving your car, you know, you can kind of see where you are. It’s got cameras on it. It can see a little bit ahead, a little bit behind.

If it’s tied into some sort of mapping program, it’ll have an overall picture of congestion in general. But if it’s tied to the satellites, it can tell you 500 meters. Up on the left, there’s a car crash that just happened. So, it’s going to kind of give you line, you know, vision beyond, line of sight, beyond the horizon.

I’m not really sure that’s useful. I think it’s cool. So, I don’t know, that’s on there. Last one, ranking of restaurants and businesses, not based on customer reuse, but based on user behavior. I really like this. I [00:25:00] don’t like customer reviews. I find them like they’re, they’re mostly fake. You know, I don’t believe them anymore.

I think a huge percentage of ’em are copied and fake and gamed and all that stuff. But if you’re using sort of spatial intelligence and you know that people will drive 30 minutes to go to one specific restaurant that actually tells you something about that one restaurant. If you see lots and lots of users going back to the same places over and over to get their coffee, that user behavior is probably a much more useful version of a ranking than a review.

So, you can start to use all this sort of frequency of visitors, how far they go as a more authentic metric than you know, four stars. So that’s it. That’s number three. I think that one’s going to be great and. Kind of the reason I like this one a lot is because it immediately ties into humanoid robots and all sorts of, you know, that embodied intelligence thing is [00:26:00] all based on sort of spatial intelligence or real-world intelligence, not necessarily writing poems.

Okay. Next one, and this is kind of the, the last of the big four. The others are smaller and I’ve talked about them before, but this one is quirk. Which people aren’t usually familiar with. Quark. Quark is, um, how do I explain Quark is a browser, right? But Alibaba has another browser called uc browser.

It’s very popular, but Quark is sort of the minimalist high speed browser. It’s pretty good for your phone.   People compare it to Google Chrome a little bit like most browsers. They’re kind of full of a bunch of stuff. You know, they’ve always got, oh, here’s articles for today. Here’s all these news feeds, here’s ads, here’s bloatware, blah, blah, blah.

They’re pretty annoying. No. Okay, so Quark is sort of a minimalist, and that’s especially a problem in China. By the way. Quark is sort of a minimalist, quick browser to use. Um, [00:27:00] fine. But now they’re adding AI to the browser, and I like AI browsers. I use perplexity Comet. On my PC, I don’t use it for a lot of stuff, but it’s compelling.

And you know, the idea is, okay, you open the browser in this case, you know, quirk or perplexity comment and any tab you open, anything you log into, basically the AI can help you with. So, if I log into my Gmail, it will pop up on the side and it will start engaging with the email and I can say, read me. New emails from today and tell me any important ones and it’ll give me a summary and I can say, write a reply to email number three.

Tell them I can’t make the meeting. It will do it now. You know? Do you give it command to send it? I don’t like to do that. I’m not even sure how much that’s allowed to do yet, but it’s just like this sort of running partner for everything you do. If I open Google Maps. It can engage there. If I open [00:28:00] YouTube, it can engage there.

If I open articles, hey, I’m reading an article in the Wall Street Journal, summarize this article for me. I really like it. I find it very interesting to play with. I’m not sure if it’ll stick. Some things are fun for a while and then they fall away. We’ll see. But, anyway, Quark becomes an AI browser.

Okay. And you know, they call that the super box or something like that. But yeah, if you’re going to do a search, you know, you can chat, you can do the search. It all is powered by the Qwen model, which is pretty good. Um, instead of saying, hey, find me a link to something I’m trying to look for, you know, I can just have it do deep research, you know, sort of run it side by side.

Um, if I want to capture something on the screen, take a picture. What do you think about this? You know, tell me what’s in this photo, all of that stuff. So, then, it’s kind of this AI companion assistant super box that know how much control you want to give to the tabs you [00:29:00] have open. That’s up to you, I suppose.

So that’s interesting you’ve seen that before. What I like about the fact that they’re doing a little differently is they’re tying this in with their smart glasses. So, Alibaba’s starting to release these smart glasses, which, you know, have little cameras on them so they can see things. They have, they’re called the   Quark S one and the   Quark G one.

You know, they have cameras, they have microphones. You can speak to it. So smart glasses, but sort of on the frontier. Not as good as meta yet, but good. And you know, the S one is sort of the higher end where it’s got mini-LED screens. Actually, they’re OLED screens, I think mini micro-OLED screens in the glasses so you can see it.

The other ones, the G ones are sort of lighter. They don’t have a display. But as you sort of walk around the world. Yeah, they’re your companions. You can talk. And I think it’s interesting that they did that with Quark and not something else. I’m not sure why they tied, like why wouldn’t you tie a map [00:30:00] and spatial intelligence to that?

Well, I guess maybe mapping is not mostly what you do, but I thought it was interesting to use Quark for the glasses. I’m not totally sure why they did that.   another function, which is pretty good. Um. Okay. Education, problem solving. This is pretty common. AI assistant, you know, you give it a math problem, you give it a physics problem, you give it a topic, you give it a hard question, and it doesn’t give you the answer.

It sort of gives you a step-by-step tutorial, explaining the concepts, helping, testing, you know, a lot of, like ChatGPT does this now. Google Gemini does this. You can put it kind of in teaching mode. That’s pretty amazing.   again, I’m not sure why they’re doing this in, um, quark interesting personal knowledge cloud.

This is actually pretty big. So last thing for   Quark that sort of got my attention is [00:31:00] you can start to store things up in the cloud, Alibaba Cloud, but it’s called Quark Cloud. And you can sort of put your knowledge up there and the idea is you’re going to sort of build a second brain for yourself. It reminds me a little bit about notebooklm, where you know, you can sort of have notebooklm the Google thing where you put in certain documents and you say, I want to do something with only these documents.

Don’t look at anything else. So, it sort of feeds off a set basis of knowledge and nothing else. This is kind of the same, where you can put it up in the cloud, the files you want, that you think are important, that are valuable to you, and then you can sort of draw on that anytime you want. You know, what did that report?

Um, by Alibaba in July 2025. Say that, you know, I, I keep reports like that. I can build sort of my own little personal library and then interact with it. Why don’t you generate an outline for me, for the meetings we had last week and what happened and what’s the next steps. So, it’s kind of like a repository.

Why don’t you make me a PowerPoint deck based on, based on the first chapter of my book, turn that into a PowerPoint deck. I kind of like that. I think I’m going to, because I use NotebookLM a lot, but this would sort of be an upgrade to that. So, the Personal Knowledge Cloud. Yeah, I’m going to try that. Those are really the big four.

I think Qwen, Amap, DingTalk and Quark, but there are other couple that, yeah, they’re not necessarily full-on AI apps, I don’t think. Well, I shouldn’t say that. They’re, they’re important. Let me, let me run through these, but I won’t go through ’em in detail cause it’s already getting a bit long here.

Obviously, I’ve written about this before, but Taobao and Tmall, right? They’re integrating AI into those from top to bottom. I’ve written about this before. I mean, that’s, you know, that’s the engine that makes Alibaba go is Taobao and Timo. So, lots of merchant tools, lots of consumer tools you can shop and explore by natural [00:33:00] language, by conversational search, as opposed to keyword search, which is a big deal.

merchant tools, content creation, all of that. You can, you know, and soon we’re going to get to agents pretty quickly. That’s coming. So, AI enhanced E-commerce, big, big deal, Fliggy, which is their travel agent, sort of like Ctrip and you know, Expedia. Yeah. That kind of mentioned this already.

They’re, they’re kind of moving this from. You know, a manual app that you engage with and hunt for hotels with and look at reviews and all of that. Yeah. Conversation. We’ve talked about this before, like why do when, whenever we talk about AI and we talk about agents, travel is always brought up, like it’s always brought up as the use case because sort of e-commerce and apps for travel don’t work very well.

You know, you book your hotel with one app. Maybe booking.com. You might book your hotel for your flight with [00:34:00] Expedia. You might book your train with something else. It doesn’t really link together very well if you want to go to restaurants where you’re going and activities, the whole thing like, you know, you really need a human to be flipping through tabs on a browser to plan your trip.

So, we’re sort of like middleware for that. And you know, one of the ideas is generative AI is very good at. Stitching together and doing collaboration across different apps and different data sets. Because it turns out, you know, it kind of operates like us. It operates between the different tabs and puts them together.

It doesn’t all have to link beautifully. So, people often talk about AI travel as, you know, this is finally going to get fixed. Okay? So, they’re going to do that with the AI Fliggy. It’s going to be end-to-end execution. You know, the whole life cycle of the trip, it’ll, it’ll tie into amap. So, the mapping will be all done.

It can tie into ding talk. So, if it’s a business trip that gets all [00:35:00] processed and so and so, fine.   last two one, which is their video generation tool. It’s really interesting, this would actually be under Youku probably, but we could also say one. The video generation tools are getting so good in the last month and three out of five, maybe half of the best ones are Chinese Cling AI is amazing.

That’s KY show. Minimax Chinese, Juan, that’s Alibaba. And if you were on sort of Twitter in the last couple days, there’s a new one going around called Sea Dance.   well that’s bite Dance. So, the leaders, and there’s a couple others from the west, you know, Sora and some, but Veo, but really like 60% of the best image and video generation tools are coming outta China.

It’s very interesting that that’s happening. People don’t seem to be talking about it very much. I’m not, [00:36:00] it’s strangely not political. Maybe it’s not a political thing. I don’t know. Anyways. Obviously this ties in with YouTube. It ties in with Youku, you know, these content creators in the last two to three months.

Like I really, I mentioned this before, I really like Star Wars videos on YouTube. They’re almost as good as the movies now. And I was kind of a frustrated ex fan because I used to love Star Wars and then Disney bought it and destroyed it, and I’ve just given up. I haven’t watched any of it for years. And then suddenly there’s a really good.

Star Wars content for the first time. And it, you know, it’s not there yet, but it’s 85%. It looks as good as the movies, at least in terms of graphic quality. The motion is a little bit dodgy here and there, but so these tools are fantastic.   cling, you know, got a lot of traction two weeks ago because they were doing character replacement where everybody can kind of be a hot girl online if you want.

Now, anyone can, you know, film yourself and you [00:37:00] can replace yourself with Brad Pitt. All of that stuff. And now we have, um, you know, sea dance sort of going all over Twitter on the last day with their really stunning level of what, what Seedance has done that’s got people’s attention. That’s ByteDance. You can give it one prompt, you know?

Um, I don’t know, Iron Man flying through a city. And it will do the video, but it will do it in multiple different viewpoints. So, the first three seconds might be Ironman flying towards you, and then it automatically gives you a side view and then it maybe shows you from below. So, it will sort of break it into different camera angles like you would normally see in a film.

And then it can put in dialogue and all of that, and it’ll, the camera will switch from one person’s face to the next. So suddenly it’s starting to look like a TV show. It’s pretty amazing actually. You know, so that’s, number seven one, which is going into Youku. Last one, which I wrote about, [00:38:00]   last week.

This is actually neat. I don’t hear anyone talking about this. They’re putting AI tools in Ali Express and alibaba.com. These are their cross border B2C and B2B e-commerce sites. So alibaba.com. You know, if you’re a business in Texas, you can buy stuff directly from factories in China. I’m actually doing some of this right now between China and Mexico.

We’re order, you know, starting to order stuff between those, I’m sorry, not Mexico, the Philippines starting to order stuff back there and alibaba.com is, is really interesting. And then Ali Express is a B2C service, so there’s a lot of Chinese manufacturers selling to consumers in Spain right now, and it’s kind of growing in Spain and France.

Okay. Once you sort of go. Cross border. You create all these new problems and AI and is pretty good at solving this. So, they have two AI apps within these websites, which are pretty cool actually. So [00:39:00] one is called Aidge. I don’t really know how to say it. It’s A-I-D-G-E. It’s a terrible name. It stands for AI for Digital and Global Entrepreneurship, A-I-D-G-E, aga.

And basically it, it helps you. Like if you’re selling on Alley Express, you’re a merchant and you want to sell to consumers in Spain, well, you have a lot of problems with that because let’s say you’re in China or the Philippines or whatever, you know, you’ve got to create a lot of content for them.   not sure how you do that.

Different language, different styles you may be selling in multiple countries. You need lots of versions. You have got to do marketing and SEO. You got to do customer service for when your customers in Spain a problem have speaking Spanish. You need; you need really consumer insights. So, this is kind of like AGA is sort of a digital copilot for SMEs who want to sell internationally.

Yeah. And this, it’s pretty, it’s pretty great actually. I think it, it’s [00:40:00] compelling. I’m going to play around with it for what we’re doing.   interesting.   actually the part I think is clever is it gives you sort of business insight. Like let’s say you have a factory in China, you’re thinking about selling in Indonesia.

You don’t know anything about Indonesia. You don’t live there; you never work there. It sort of becomes your expert and you could say, look what market sectors would make sense for my products? And it will start to work through you, you know, the questions and how to think about where to target, what to do, okay, what kind of content should I use?

And then obviously it does things like customer service and logistics and all that. So, AGA is pretty cool.   The other one is accio, A-C-C-I-O. I really don’t know why they’re naming ’em these things. It’s, it’s not awesome. This is more like your sourcing agent, okay? You’re a, you’re a business in Texas that makes tables, makes cabinets, or makes machines.

You need some parts from China. This is your sourcing agent. This is sort of just an upgrade of alibaba.com, where it will help you find [00:41:00] factories, you know, find where you can get your product. It will help you evaluate the factories. It’ll help you translate and talk to the factory and make all your orders.

It’ll hand customs, taxes, all of that permitting us to get through. Okay. That’s a pretty good tool. So anyways, I’d go aidgo and Accio both. Cool. Anyways, that’s my list for today. I hope that’s helpful. I think one, I think they’re cool. I think they’re worth playing around with. And I guess the part that I’m excited about is they’re advancing really, really quickly.

You know, it’s not like you just have an e-commerce site that’s trying out new tools. No, they’re build, they’re on the frontier of building their tools themselves, so they’re going to push the boundaries. And I, I kind of like that. It’s exciting. Anyways, that’s it. I’ll put the list of these in the show notes and um, you know, some of ’em are on apps you can download.

Some of ’em are online. Pretty fun. As for me, it’s been kind of crazy actually. I was in the [00:42:00] Philippines for a couple days bouncing around Manila. Lots of meetings, lots of progress. Um, things are moving pretty fast on that. Um, we have got some projects there that are really going quite well, so that, that’s, um, one, it’s good business and that’s always important, but two, it’s a lot of fun.

I really enjoy the people I’m getting to work with, so we’re having a good old time, and I’ll probably go back there in a couple weeks. Um, what else? Heading to Spain for a mobile world conference. That should be great.   I love Madrid and Barcelona. I haven’t been there in a while, so I’m kind of excited about that.

Um, what else? I don’t have anything to do, oh, you know what? I’ve been watching, um, singles Inferno, which is on Netflix, season five. I’ve watched literally all five seasons of this show, which is it? It’s a Korean dating. They go on an island. There’s lots of drama and back and forth. It’s, it’s ridiculous, but it’s highly entertaining.

I don’t know why I like it, but I’ve watched now five seasons. So, season five of Singles Inferno is, is [00:43:00] out. That’s a recommendation. What else? You know what’s weird? I watched this, um, TV show, this Netflix show about Robbie Williams. You ever watch one of these biopics, especially when the person’s involved.

Like in this case, they interview the person and at the end of the biopic, you like the person dramatically less than before you watched it. Like, I watched this thing, I don’t know Robbie Williams singer. It’s not my job. I don’t know, I know anything about ’em. I just kind of know the name and the image.

And after watching it, I’m like, I like this person much less than when I didn’t know who they were. I, that’s happened a couple times, like I watched the Elton John movie, rocket Man, and I, I liked Elton John much less than before. Who else? Eric Clapton. The same thing happened when I watched Eric Clapton.

I’m like, there should be a warning label on those. Like, if you really like this artist, no, that’s just my opinion, but if you really like this artist, don’t watch this because it’s going to kind of [00:44:00] ruin it for you. So yeah, I watched that last night and I’m like, good, this is not good. I don’t want to listen to his stuff anymore.

I don’t know why. So, yeah, that was, that’s not exactly a recommendation. That’s a, a non-recommendation, I suppose, anyways. I don’t know if there’s a word for that. There should be a word for that. Anyways. Okay, that’s it for me. I hope this is helpful and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

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