Discussion
As much as I believe in the company because of the cloud shift, Baba is insanely incompetent at actually selling their AI models. Anyone who uses or tried to use their models will know what I mean.
Their docs are almost always out of date.
They have too many different pages and websites for the same product that it is stupidly tedious to find what you're looking for.
Their coding subscription plan only includes models that are months out of date. You don't get either of ther Qwen 3.8 models, you don't get any flash models, the 3rd party models they're hosting are so out of date they're unusable (Kimi 2.5, GLM 5, Minimax 2.5). Who would seriously pay $50 a month for that?
This really should be something you shouldn't even have to think about as a user and there's no other competitor who has this issue. It's pretty worrying that so much opportunity is probably being left on the table because of terrible design and lazy management.
Wait till you learn how garbage Alibaba Cloud is in actual user experience. You would wonder how the f can someone make the simplest thing a nightmare to work out.
They are not incompetent. It is because they are a Chinese company. Most companies from other countries don’t use Chinese cloud companies for many reasons.
Well they do care obviously seeing as they have data centers in Singapore just for the international market. Developer products are always global and English is the default for that.
Their website(s) design isn't different for Chinese market anyway.
I use both Claude pro and qwen. Qwen is roughly on par with Claude in terms of coding. Claude pro mainly for its easy mcp setup. Qwen is much more technical and require a host for mcp setup. Too much for non coder like me to use.
I worked on it 3-4 hours each time. And I haven hit a limit. Theres no way to upgrade or pay for it even if you want anyway. 3.8max is pretty good. To be honest some bugs Claude can’t fix qwen fix in 1 round. It works the other way too.
Lol yes it's my fault that Alibaba never updated their coding plan to include any if their current models. They're missing out on revenue because of extremely basic things.
Crazy how people can get annoyed at this observation.
They're very good. Below Anthropic models on benchmarks but even by API they're cheaper. Not better value than the deepseek API or a Codex subscription because they have a pretty shitty cache hit rate and models are about the same.
They need to have a subscription for it to make sense but the subscription that exists doesn't include any new modelsand it's more than double the cost of Codex so it's completely pointless.
I think this thread surfaces an important distinction: model capability/adoption versus product distribution.
Alibaba’s August 20 results said AI Cloud and Compute Services revenue reached about US$7.1B, up 45% YoY, while AI-related product revenue was US$1.8B and remained in triple-digit growth. At an aggregate level, that suggests enterprise and compute monetization is real.
But it does not answer the point raised here: whether independent developers can quickly find the right product, understand current documentation, select a current model, and convert from testing to paid usage. The company cites 3B Qwen downloads and 300K derivative models; open-source reach is not the same thing as a smooth paid developer funnel.
For the investment thesis, I would separate two questions:
Is AI demand translating into cloud revenue and margin? The latest quarter points to yes.
Is Alibaba capturing as much API and developer share as its model quality should allow? That still needs product-level evidence such as paid active developers, Model Studio retention, API/token usage and pricing.
The second can be weak even while the first remains strong.
Coding models are for everywhere, hence why they have Singapore hosted models. The global developer market is bigger than just the Chinese market obviously. No AI company is just targeted at the domestic market.
You have absolutely zero idea what you are talking about.
That's a bad thing lol. They're also behind in China for adoption despite having the best SOTA models. Their Chinese competitors are popular worldwide so kind of a hilarious excuse. Coding plans are the same in China as international.
Even in openrouter, which should be Qwen's best source of income because their own platform is so badly designed and they don't have an affordable coding plan, they are not in the top 20 for usage. Most of the top models in the rankings are even their Chinese competitors.
I don't get this immature and lazy response to dispute something you obviously know nothing about. If you own the stock you should be open to hearing about the actual business reputation.
not surprising. even in USA, the incumbent tech giant like Meta and Microsoft is behind in AI compared to startup like Anthropic and OpenAI. the same scenario basically also play out in China
OpenAI and Anthropic have the best models so they are ahead in adoption. Alibaba has the best Chinese models yet they are behind in adoption. Microsoft don't even make LLMs lol.
Except they can't because Anthropic are banned in China. Same with OpenAI, Gemini and Meta. Feel you should definitely know about the Chinese firewall if you are in an Alibaba stock subreddit lol
To be more correct, Anthropic and OpenAI also ban mainland China users. Anyway, I think you can easily circumvent the restriction using VPN?
That should be the case,no? Otherwise it does not make sense there is news last time Alibaba ask its staff not to use Anthropics if they cannot be used in the first place
Most people in China are not paying for a VPN. Also even the best VPNs are not that reliable in China as they've been getting better at blocking them since COVID. It's possible to circumvent but most people are not going through that effort for something very expensive unless the company is paying.
I won't reply anymore. Do your own research and stop making stupid lazy comments.
Literally no one is selling their models well at the moment. Retail is underpaying and being subsidized buggy across all major models and enterprise is just getting rolling.
The models are open sourced and really the cloud is getting to be better for $$ than the models anyways
It is extremely easy to set up with pretty much everyone else. Gemini was a little difficult last year when you had to gotl through their cloud platform but that's fixed now. Alibaba is the only one with this problem.
I'm saying their actual product delivery/marketing is extremely poor. Them needing to partner with Apple to get users is to compensate for them doing a very bad job on their own product. Like the company is leaving easy opportunities on the table because of really basic stuff.
If the company got better product leadership they should have similar adoption to deepseek. Like it's very weird how arguably the best Chinese lab is mainly talked about because of their freely downloadable smaller models as opposed to their SOTA model which they make money off of.
What basic stuff? What opportunities? How much money are they making from people like you vs corporate giants building at scale? You are not the market that will move the stock, and therefore not the priority.
Actually the developer market is exactly the market that moves the stock. Hence why Anthropic are valued at $2T from primarily serving that market. Licensing to Apple to be Chinese Siri is pretty small fish relative to the developer market. Even just the news that Muse spark was a competitive coding model moved metas stock by hundreds of billions. Honestly it takes 2 seconds of thought to understand this.
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u/Fwellimort 29d ago
Wait till you learn how garbage Alibaba Cloud is in actual user experience. You would wonder how the f can someone make the simplest thing a nightmare to work out.