The Chinese billionaire, who once likened AI to love, argued that the technology should be tailored to serve people and make their lives better. It should protect livelihoods, Ma told Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. employees during a rare appearance Thursday. 

“We’re not trying to make machines more like humans. We’re trying to make them understand humans, to think like us and do things we can’t,” Ma said in brief remarks before staff at their Hangzhou campus. It’s the responsibility of technologists to ensure that AI knows and supports humankind, he added.

Alibaba, which built its success on e-commerce in China, has pivoted aggressively into artificial intelligence in recent years. It introduced a flagship AI model series called Qwen that garnered wide acclaim and set the company up to compete with OpenAI and China’s own Deepseek. 

In February, chief executive officer Eddie Wu said the company’s “primary objective” was now artificial general intelligence, a somewhat hazy goal in the industry to build AI systems with human-level intellectual capabilities. 

That shift helped the company recover from years of turmoil after Ma clashed with the country’s Communist Party over regulation of the private sector. Ma, who had been China’s highest-profile business leader, largely disappeared from public view over the next few years. He emerged around 2023 with occasional visits to the Alibaba facilities, as well as posts on the company’s internal employee forum.

In February, Ma joined other prominent entrepreneurs in a high-profile meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to talk through new technologies and innovations. The gathering signaled Beijing’s support for a long-marginalized private sector considered key to reviving the world’s No. 2 economy.

On Thursday, the billionaire seemed to recapture some of his old eloquence.

“Technology isn’t just about conquering the stars and the oceans,” he said in remarks provided to Bloomberg News. “It’s about preserving the spark among all of us.”