Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming: The defining products of the machine intelligence era have yet to emerge

At the 2026 Yunqi Conference held in Hangzhou from September 22 to 24, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming delivered a keynote speech. Wu stated that as AI continues to be deployed and AI infrastructure expands, reasoning and thinking are becoming commodities that can be supplied at scale, much like electricity.

Wu noted, 'We believe the future will enter an era of machine intelligence.' He shared two key predictions about this transition. His first forecast is that the total volume of thinking generated by machines will eventually exceed human thinking by more than 1,000 times. While human cognitive output may still grow, machine reasoning will expand at a far faster pace, ultimately shouldering 99.9% of global thought.

He added that in this future, every 'super individual' could wield an intellectual leverage tens of thousands of times greater than today. The consumption of thinking would no longer scale with population size, but instead with the depth of machine intelligence and the scale of its supply. Machine-generated thought will ultimately far surpass human output entirely.

'From a simple calculation, current machine thinking accounts for less than 3% of human thinking. If it reaches 1,000 times the human level, the demand for machine reasoning still has tens of thousands of times more room to grow,' Wu explained.

His second prediction is that the hallmark products of the machine intelligence era have not yet appeared. In his view, today's AI-assisted programming is akin to the early electric light bulb of the machine intelligence age. It merely replaces existing human tasks, such as manually writing code or drafting reports. AI is already widely entering office environments, but merely substituting current work is not enough to usher in an entirely new epoch.

'It's difficult to predict what new products and inventions will emerge once machine intelligence breaks out. Just as standing beside the light bulb in 1882, it was hard to imagine the dazzling variety of innovations that the electrical age would bring,' he said.