Steven Hoi
By Shi Yixin
Alibaba Group has bolstered its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with the appointment of renowned AI scientist Professor Steven Hoi (Xu Zhuhong) as Group Vice President, reporting directly to senior executive Wu Jia.
This strategic move signals Alibaba’s intensified focus on consumer-facing AI applications, particularly in the areas of multimodal foundational models and AI agent technologies.
With over two decades of experience in both academia and industry, Hoi is recognized as a leading authority in AI. A 2019 IEEE Fellow, Hoi was ranked among the “top 1% of global AI scientists” by Stanford University. He has authored more than 300 highly cited research papers, accumulating over 50,000 citations. His groundbreaking work in multimodal pretraining, including cost-efficient strategies now widely adopted in the development of large models, has established him as a pivotal expert in the field. Before joining Alibaba, Hoi served as VP at Salesforce, where he founded and led the company’s Asia AI Research Institute, and later launched an AI startup focused on advanced multimodal language and generative models.
Industry analysts view Hoi’s appointment as a crucial step in Alibaba’s bid to dominate China’s competitive AI application landscape. The company is actively assembling a world-class AI research and engineering team, with an increased focus on recruiting top-tier talent. Hoi’s expertise in scalable multimodal systems is expected to accelerate innovations in AI agents--a key area for developing personalized, interactive platforms.
“Attracting a scientist of Hoi’s caliber underscores Alibaba’s commitment to leading the next phase of consumer AI,” said a sector analyst. “His leadership could unlock new paradigms in how users engage with AI, from content creation to real-time problem-solving.”