Alibaba invests $27 million in education startup to expand its generative artificial intelligence portfolio amid price war in China

Alibaba Group Holding has invested around 200 million yuan ($27.6 million) in artificial intelligence (AI) education startup Zhejiang Jingzhunxue, as the Chinese e-commerce giant continues to make a strong bet on the artificial intelligence sector.

Hangzhou-based Jingzhunxue said on Wednesday that it has received support from Alibaba to support the development and promotion of Bong, an artificial intelligence-based educational device created by the startup. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Powered by Alibaba’s Qwen model and Jingzhunxue’s Big Language Model (LLM), Bong is a personalized and interactive teaching tool for students that provides AI-generated video lessons taught by digital educators, according to the startup’s announcement. The product is scheduled to appear on the market in June.

“The bottleneck in personalized education fundamentally lies in supply-side constraints,” Jingzhunxue CEO Yang Renbin said in a statement, noting that China lacks teachers for its gigantic student population.

“Artificial intelligence is expected to completely solve the challenge of achieving personalized learning at scale,” said Yang, who was previously Alibaba’s chief technology officer.

The investment comes at a time when Chinese technology companies, from big tech to new startups, are seeking to monetize generative AI technologies by applying them across industries. For example, Jingzhunxue focuses on the education sector.

Alibaba itself has invested in a number of generative artificial intelligence startups aspiring to build leading alternatives to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is officially unavailable in China.

The Hangzhou-based company is: main supporter of Moonshot AIone of the hottest artificial intelligence startups in the country, Alibaba revealed in its annual report released last week.

In addition to its 36% stake in Moonshot AI, Alibaba also has stakes in three other startup startups China’s “Four New AI Tigers”namely Baichuan, Zhipu AI and MiniMax, according to data services provider ITJuzi.com, making the e-commerce giant one of the most prolific venture capitalists in the country.

In addition to outside investment, Alibaba is working on its own Qwen series of large AI models, also known as Tongyi Qianwen, which have been integrated into its services such as the DingTalk workplace collaboration platform.

China’s AI generative services market is becoming increasingly competitive.

The country’s major tech giants, including Alibaba, Tencent Holdings and ByteDance, are losing ground full-fledged LLM price waroffering steep discounts to lure users to the right products and putting pressure on startups with smaller war chests.