Alibaba Inspirational Quotes

In October 2014, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and raised $25 billion, marking it as the largest IPO in history. Alibaba is also one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world.

Zhang is her brand’s face, design inspiration, marketing department, and much more. She and other web celebs find their customers on social media. The companies that run the back end are small, often no more than one or two hundred people, supporting over a dozen brands like LIN’s. They only sell online; they keep little to no inventory and own no factories. Yet they do a rousing business. In the first four months of 2015, LIN had 80 million RMB in sales (about US$11 million), keeping nearly 30 percent as pure profit.8 LIN and other web-celeb companies have evolved quickly since 2015 and can show readers from traditional industries a new approach to operations, marketing, and data-driven strategy.

In a paper published in 1950, the computer scientist Alan Turing suggested a legendary test for whether an AI exhibited human-level intelligence. When AI could display humanlike conversational abilities for a lengthy period of time, such that a human interlocutor couldn’t tell they were speaking to a machine, the test would be passed: the AI, conversationally akin to a human, deemed intelligent. For more than seven decades this simple test has been an inspiration for many young researchers entering the field of AI. Today, as the LaMDA-sentience saga illustrates, systems are already close to passing the Turing test. But, as many have pointed out, intelligence is about so much more than just language (or indeed any other single facet of intelligence taken in isolation). One particularly important dimension is in the ability to take actions. We don’t just care about what a machine can say; we also care about what it can do. What we would really like to know is, can I give an AI an ambiguous, open-ended, complex goal that requires interpretation, judgment, creativity, decision-making, and acting across multiple domains, over an extended time period, and then see the AI accomplish that goal? Put simply, passing a Modern Turing Test would involve something like the following: an AI being able to successfully act on the instruction “Go make $1 million on Amazon in a few months with just a $100,000 investment.” It might research the web to look at what’s trending, finding what’s hot and what’s not on Amazon Marketplace; generate a range of images and blueprints of possible products; send them to a drop-ship manufacturer it found on Alibaba; email back and forth to refine the requirements and agree on the contract; design a seller’s listing; and continually update marketing materials and product designs based on buyer feedback. Aside from the legal requirements of registering as a business on the marketplace and getting a bank account, all of this seems to me eminently doable. I think it will be done35 with a few minor human interventions within the next year, and probably fully autonomously within three to five years.