In a week that saw the world’s tech giants make bold moves in artificial intelligence, the global race toward superintelligence has reached a fever pitch. Alibaba, Meta, and OpenAI—each a household name in its own right—are now staking unprecedented sums and reputations on the pursuit of artificial superintelligence (ASI), a concept that just a few years ago seemed the stuff of science fiction. Now, as billions of dollars flow into infrastructure, talent, and new models, the stakes are higher than ever and the competitive landscape is shifting in real time.
On October 3, 2025, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu took to the stage in Hangzhou at Alibaba Cloud’s annual conference to make what many analysts are calling a historic declaration. According to Daily AI News, Wu became the first leader of a major Chinese technology company to explicitly set ASI as a corporate goal. In a 23-minute keynote, Wu stated, “achieving AGI now appears inevitable” and emphasized that “AGI is not the end of AI’s development, but its beginning.” The company’s ambitions are backed by a staggering $53 billion investment in AI infrastructure over the next three years—a war chest that signals China’s intent to compete at the very frontier of AI development.
Alibaba’s announcement wasn’t just about rhetoric; it came with tangible technological leaps. The company unveiled new multimodal Qwen models, which combine text, images, video, and audio capabilities, marking a significant advance in open-source AI. Qwen, as reported, is currently the world’s most popular open-source AI system, going head-to-head with Western leaders like GPT and Claude. Wu’s vision is nothing short of a paradigm shift: he wants AI models to replace traditional operating systems as the fundamental interface layer for computing. This, he argued, would mean “rewriting the entire computational stack, not just building better chatbots.”
The impact was immediate. Alibaba’s stock surged, contributing to a $250 billion market value recovery in 2025. Wu outlined a three-stage roadmap for the company’s AI ambitions: first, emergent reasoning; next, autonomous action with tools; and finally, self-iterating AI that surpasses human capabilities. Helen Toner of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology commented, “This ASI narrative is definitely something new, especially among the biggest tech companies in China.”
Timing, as always, is everything. Alibaba’s announcement landed just as U.S. companies found themselves facing growing skepticism around the AI investment boom. On October 5, 2025, Bloomberg published a major analysis highlighting mounting concerns about an AI investment bubble. According to the report, venture capital funding for AI startups reached a record $192.7 billion through the third quarter of 2025, putting the year on track to be the first in which more than half of all VC dollars flow to AI companies. Yet, with this explosive growth comes doubt: is the return on these trillion-dollar infrastructure bets really assured?
The Bloomberg analysis pointed out that despite OpenAI’s projected 2025 revenue tripling to $12.7 billion and ChatGPT’s user base swelling to roughly 700 million weekly users, questions about diminishing returns from scaling laws are mounting. Even some AI proponents have acknowledged that the market appears “frothy.” The capital is also consolidating around established players—names like Anthropic, xAI, and OpenAI—while non-AI startups find themselves squeezed out of the investment spotlight.
Amid this backdrop, OpenAI’s own moonshot project has hit turbulence. Eight months after OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s company io for $6.5 billion, the team’s vision for a revolutionary screen-less AI device is running into fundamental design challenges. According to sources cited by Daily AI News, the device—intended to process audio and visual cues from its environment without a traditional screen—has yet to solve key issues around its “personality,” privacy safeguards, computing requirements, and the all-important question of how to create an “always on” AI that knows when to speak and when to stay silent. The device’s 2026 launch is now at risk of delay.
Even with Sam Altman’s vision, Jony Ive’s design pedigree, and seemingly unlimited capital, the problems are proving stubborn. As Daily AI News observed, “Hardware is just harder and slower than software, especially when you’re inventing entirely new interaction models.” The “always on” conversation problem is particularly tricky: it’s easy to build an AI that talks too much or waits for a wake word, but much harder to create one that feels natural, helpful, and unobtrusive.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, Meta has doubled down on its own superintelligence ambitions. In one of the industry’s most high-profile appointments of the year, Mark Zuckerberg tapped Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old founder of Scale AI, to head Meta’s newly minted Superintelligence Labs. According to Bloomberg, Wang now serves as both Chief AI Officer and Chief Architect of Meta’s superintelligence program. Meta’s commitment to this partnership is underscored by its $14.3 billion investment into Scale AI, a move that signals the company’s determination to stay at the cutting edge of AI development.
Wang wasted no time in shaking things up. Since his appointment, he has begun a major reorganization of Meta’s AI division, splitting it into four specialized groups to sharpen focus and improve efficiency. In an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg, Wang wrote, “Superintelligence is coming, and in order to take it seriously, we need to organize around the key areas that will be critical to reach it—research, product and infra.” This restructuring is a clear signal that Meta is aligning its efforts with rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic, focusing on long-term research and foundational model development rather than short-term product cycles.
Wang’s own story is the stuff of Silicon Valley legend. Born to Chinese immigrant physicists in New Mexico, he dropped out of MIT at 19 to found Scale AI with Lucy Guo. The company quickly became a linchpin in the AI world, providing the massive labeled datasets needed to train modern AI systems. By May 2024, Scale AI was valued at nearly $14 billion, backed by investors such as Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta itself. Wang’s deep ties to OpenAI’s Sam Altman and influential lawmakers in Washington, D.C. have only added to his status as one of the youngest billionaires in tech.
As the world’s largest tech companies pour resources into the ASI race, the lines between economic competition and technological rivalry are blurring. Alibaba’s $53 billion bet, Meta’s strategic overhaul under Wang, and OpenAI’s hardware ambitions all point to a new era—one in which the pursuit of superintelligence is not just about chatbots or search engines, but about redefining the very foundation of computing and society itself.
With record-breaking investments and high-profile hires, the AI arms race is no longer a distant prospect but a present reality, shaping not only the future of technology but the balance of power in the global economy.
