Alibaba has hired Steven Hoi, one of the world's top artificial intelligence scientists and a former Salesforce vice president, according to Chinese media outlet Jiemian News.
Citing people familiar with the matter, Thursday's report said that Hoi will become a vice president of Alibaba Group, in charge of multimodal basic models and Agents-related basic research and application solutions in the AI To C business area.
He will focus on improving Alibaba's ability to combine models with applications in C-end products for AI applications, in order to realize end-to-end closed-loop innovation, the people revealed.
According to the report, Hoi is currently based in Singapore in a management capacity, and his rank may reach P10 or even P11.
Before joining Alibaba, Hoi was a tenured professor at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, and served as a faculty member at Nanyang Technological University for many years.
He has made outstanding achievements in the field of machine learning and AI applications, with research results covering multimedia information retrieval, computer vision, big data analysis and other fields, and has published more than 200 high-quality papers, which have been cited more than 8,000 times.
Hoi has also served as Vice President of Salesforce, the world's largest enterprise software vendor, and founding Managing Director of Salesforce Research Asia, where he led several AI research projects and application products.
In 2019, he was elected IEEE Fellow, representing the world's top achievements in the fields of science and engineering technology, and was selected by Stanford University as one of the world's "top 1%" scientists in artificial intelligence.
The personnel change comes at a critical stage in Alibaba's accelerated layout of AI consumer-level applications.
At the same time, Alibaba is said to be forming a top AI algorithm research and engineering team for its AI To C business, attracting a large number of outstanding talents in the industry to join.
