By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
Alibaba releasing a new AI model in its Quinn series that can run on phones and laptops. The company saying it can process text, pictures, audio, and videos while generating real-time text and natural speech responses. Alibaba expecting the new model to be used to build AI agents that could help a visually impaired person navigate their environment with real-time audio descriptions. Mark Malik still with me to discuss, you got the ADRs here up about 3 and a half percent for Baba. What do you make of Baba right now? Do you think the run-up that we’ve seen in the stock indicates that it’s a little bit too expensive or is there still opportunity for investors who believe in the mission?
01:00 Mark Malik
Yeah, I think it is a little bit expensive here, and I think, uh, you know, this news is interesting, but really it just represents a progression of technology, right? It’s not necessarily in the big AI play that we all want to sort of attribute it to. Uh, they’re finding ways of putting AI Shocker into laptops and and and handsets. It’s a completely different play than we’ve been talking about more recently. Uh, so it’s a progression and, uh, in terms of of where the company is now, uh, in terms of the guidance of the company, the outlook for the company, the challenges with a company like that is because it’s such a broad company. There’s so much we don’t know about the company, and of course, there’s the government influence on the company. It’s very hard to make a an investment thesis on a company like that. But we have seen it run up quite a bit, and we’ve seen it run up on pretty good news. But the question is, is what does it all mean? How is that going to translate? I think if we put the same level of scrutiny that we’re putting in the domestic AI stocks on Alibaba, we might come up with a different, we might come up with a different picture.
03:18 Speaker A
No, it’s such a great point, especially about the lack of transparency there. I I wonder how that plays into your thoughts on this question about whether or not the China AI names are indicative that the US AI stocks and tech names in in general are spending too much money on AI and that it’s not actually worth it. You’re not going to get the bang for your buck on that ROI moving forward. How are you viewing that discussion?
04:00 Mark Malik
Yeah, I think as we talked about last time I was here, the the progression of AI, the growing of the market, the competition is extremely healthy for all companies. So even if you have a company in China that has a more efficient way of building models, that’s that’s great. That just means we’re going to get more power out of the same infrastructure that we’re building. So you’re not going to see people saying, oh, okay, they have a more efficient way, we don’t want to use that. We’re going to use the same power we’ve already built, the same infrastructure with those more efficient models. So in terms of the infrastructure investment, that is very much alive, and it’s for us consumers, it’s a very much good thing because we’re just going to have better AI. More competition is good for us.