Jack Ma fell to earth and took Ant's mega IPO with him
reuters.com
reuters.com
Jack Ma said banks should ditch the "pawnshop" mindset and switch to a credit-based loan service, because his Ant's micro/small loan service is completely backed by credit rather than something risk-proof properties like a house. Ant not only acts like a bank, but also is the largest credit buerau in China. It provides loan based on the credit score it rates on its customers.
This article also fails to mention the Basel Accords that Jack Ma criticized. After the 2008 financial crisis, Basel III includes regulations on "shadow banks" like Ant in addition to traditional banks. Is it possible for a bank that has only assets of 3B lends out 300B[1]? No, banks are prohibited due to regulations. But, Ant already did. They created an Asset-Backed Security (ABS) via a process called securitization. It is unprecedented that a financial institution with such big financial leverage and a large amount loan going unregulated.
A pawnshop is at least backed by real properties like houses. What back the risk Ant create? Consumers' credit?
If I still cannot make you understand, please google "2008 MBS ABS". You'd be surprised at the similarity of what Ant's been doing and what caused the financial crisis.
I sincerely hope hacker news readers take a look into the underlying financial bubble rather than "Chinese government reaps tech innovator" to which this article tries to mislead you.
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http...
>After the 2008 financial crisis, Basel III includes regulations on "shadow banks" like Ant in addition to traditional banks. Is it possible for a bank that has only assets of 3B lends out 300B? But, Ant already did. They created an Asset-Backed Security (ABS) via a process called securitization. It is unprecedented that a financial institution with such big financial leverage and a large amount loan going unregulated.
If that's the case, why were they being allowed to continue as a privately-owned lender for so long?
These why now questions unfortunately never have satisfactory answers. Too early: there is no scam/govt is stifling innovation, in the middle: not enough proof, late: why regulators were sleeping till now.
I do not have any source to back my guesses.
You can make a shady case for modern western idea of finance but China has had a strong finacial industry for centuries.
That is a very good question, from public information I can gather around Ant and Ma's career in general, it seems he has strong backings from a wide range of powerful people due to financial relations as well as his reputation -- he is the Elon Musk of China and commands tremendous respect and pride among not just citizens but also top leadership.
In fact, his backing is so strong that China's banking and financial regulators have not been successful at regulating Ant despite other fintech pioneers' blatant failings. However, this time he miscalculated how far he can push and the more conservative voices in the party have finally gained an upper hand.
No one was surprised by his laughable showing in the chat with Elon at WAI 2019 where he behaves like a fraud.
His backing from powerful hidden political figures are well acknowledged. Although that's not new, anyone who commands such power are backed that way, this pattern can trace back to Qin and Han dynasty.
In this case it's a metaphor for westernized.
Jack Ma is competent in speaking Mandarin Chinese. So the equivalent would be to force Elon Musk to debate against Jack Ma in Mandarin.
Ma isn't an engineer and doesn't pretend to be, which is why you can't take anything he says about AI seriously. I'm sure he's corrupt in the same way a lot of Chinese businessmen are corrupt. That said, you don't go from being a tour guide to building a e-commerce platform with arguably the most sophisticated supply chain the world solely by being a fraud.
Also I agree the hate is overblown but I also don’t think Elon is the worlds savior so I tend to push back against that rhetoric.
Many would say the same about Musk
But that pawn shop comment, man if that's really related to the fact that pawn shops exist because something backs the loan ... and if Ant is really as big as folks say it is (I'm talking about my ignorance here, not anything deceptive) and it is could have a huge impact on Chinese banks.... that's a lot to worry about.
I don't pretend to know China's motivations or etc, but I think there may be very real regulatory concerns.
We’re talking about a leverage ratio of 100, that’s a crazy figure, if I’m not mistaken Lehman’s leverage ratio when it folded was of “only” 30.
The issue is moreso that Ma seemed to somehow have captured the regulation to delay this, and only now, with the huge attention, was the regulation enforced.
That being said, this mode of failure is ten thousand times better than having the bank fail a few years down the line, so it's clearly by far the better choice.
This should be a wake-up call to the CCP to reduce their cronyism with the billionaire class, but I'm not sure they will take heed.
What will happen is that the rats will scatter and hide for a while until the ruling class goes back to power hunting. At which point they will come back out and begin engaging in similar outlandish behavior while trying not to wake the tiger.
Regulator's point of view is safety by design. Ant can fuck up something like the risk management process and still won't go bankrupt and take the financial sector with it if there is sudden adverse event. Jack Ma thinks its about innovation and he and his company alone can mitigate the risks and the society and the government should just trust them to be the vanguard.
So Jack Ma has irreconcilable views with the government regulators. And he came out to present his views in that meeting. Its not that government saw his comments as challenge the government's authority or something. The regulators would have pushed out the new changes even if he didn't say anything.
They simply cannot think from any other perspectives that can reveal their fundamental flaws.
Unlike communism authoritarian, who at least can admit the effectiveness of capitalism in mobilizing the society in economy activity.
This shared environment lead them to a worldview where myopic self-interest is the only thing that matters.
In other words, I think the shared material environment dominates culture and upbringing, and leads to transcultural trends here.
blaming financial crisis on ABS/MBS is wrong. Some ABS/MBS may be very risky and it is just fine. The Ant's ABS sound like very risky and it is just fine. An informed investor may as well choose to play with such a risk for a high premium.
The true cause of 2008 was humongous amount of cheaply bought CDS because the underlying MBS were rated AAA which is several orders of magnitude higher then they should have been. It is like a somebody buying for $1 a $1M "life insurance" - basically betting - on a life of a 100 year old person. An insurer selling such insurance (ie. CDS) would quickly go bust like it happened in 2008.
My understanding is that the loans don't go on Ant's books, they just sell them on. In that case, Ant's assets are irrelevant, since they're not the ones taking any risk and, thus, don't have to cover for the losses.
This balance sheet is indeed what regulators would require them to hold capital/reserves against.
Further, what’s the documentation that they “just sell them on” end if they do, why wouldn’t their balance sheet shrink??
I can't find a clear source, but it looks to me that 300B is total loans issued, not what Ant currently has on their balance sheet.
> Even if they are just “warehousing” the credit this would be false, as they need to hold some of those assets on balance sheet while they try to sell them.
Yes, they would have to hold _some_ capital reserves, but that number should be based off of whatever they have on their balance sheet at any given time, not off of the total loans issued number.
Says they have a $250bn mutual fund.
Sorry but even if it's a liability (in this case the deposit that ends up in the money market fund) that's technically...on balance sheet. You can pretend it's in a WMP, or a NCD or whatever alphabet soup you want, but if someone thinks of it as an "Ant deposit"...that's on balance sheet.
If it's things like free speech and a wide and colorful political spectrum, then yes, China basically has no freedom.
But if it's economic freedom, China has way more than most western countries.
Remains to be seen which kind matters for innovation.
and we have a situation where political freedoms a shrinking every where with different speeds and from different starting points, economic freedoms are moving in different directions all over the world even inside big countries.
without a very complex model of all of it it's nearly impossible to tell what combination is the most favorable to a particular kind of innovation(for example face recognition might be a lot harder to innovate in a country with great political freedoms regardless of economic freedoms).
Wait and see. This is just one week in a 20 year journey.
Ma hasn't lost anything.
Example: you think lending to folks with low credit scores is a risk, but I evaluate credit in a different way that lets me discover that some folks with low credit scores really are credit worthy.
Note that I am not supporting Ant Financial with my comment. I have no clue how their business works. But your comment is missing a key point.
However, if you're playing with someone else's money, then you do not get the privilege to make arbitrary calls on what's risky and what's not; the society has to presume that you may be mistaken or lying (especially because there's an incentive to lie), we have to discard and ignore your novel, innovative evaluations, and evaluate the risk according to some conservative measure that other people trust. I mean, it's not about being allowed or disallowed to make the loans, it's about capitalization requirements to cover the risks i.e. the need to back up your assumption that these people really are credit worthy with your own funds.
Innovation on better credit evaluation can help you lose less money on bad loans, which directly impacts your profit as a lender; but it can't (or at least shouldn't) be used to justify that you deserve extra leverage so that you'd have lower capital costs; the capital requirements are there to protect others from your risk-taking.
100x typical risk is not something most investors recognize as real let alone a sane investment. A financial advisor would ask how the fund is making a 100x return and step faaaar back from that portfolio.
Is this sarcasm?
If I am ambitious, why would I be an innovator in this system? Versus the person deciding who gets rich?
Most medium-big All companies have one or more board members coming from the “party”.
It’s not a secret they very calmly tell you the same thing when you visit them in China.
Agree this isn’t news to anyone familiar with China. What led Ma to make the alleged comments is beyond me.
That doesn’t invalidate discussing its effects.
Why would the person deciding who gets rich let someone else become such person? I mean, it's not impossible, but is certainly very hard, risky and needs some unique skillsets.
Sometimes you don't have the choice, no matter how you are ambitious.
No man rules alone. And no man is immortal.
If you are smart, ambitious and lucky enough to build a multibillion dollar company, you can put those faculties to work climbing the political ladder.
For the same reasons people build better lives for themselves in places even less hospitable to their personal aims. Lack of resources, family, lack of practical freedom... the list goes on. Hell, some people actually are patriotic.
But frankly, I do think this matters much less than people are making this out to be. Larger-than-life superhero CEOs are bullshit. I do not believe you needed Musk or Kalanick to get things that look like their companies. US culture just desperately wants to believe in their homemade gods, so you get conversations like this.
hear, hear
This is well written. Thank you.
If you believe in the exceptional, or believe you are exceptional, America will draw you to it. If you don’t believe in exceptionalism, America looks like it incurs costs for no gain. The Chinese system in contrast looks balanced.
I believe in exceptional people. Almost every measure of a variety of skills has long tails. In most cases, those tails are developed through working at a skill and are not the sole product of innate talent. Incentivising that development thus makes a civilisation more capable.
But I’m not so wedded to this belief as to claim it the only way. If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech doesn’t make sense: there are no special thoughts which, if extinguished, are unlikely to recur for a long, long time.
I think this only holds if you take a deeply communitarian outlook, which is somewhat difficult to mesh with a belief in the value of the exceptional individual.
I value freedom of speech for the same reason I value other freedoms, for the boringly baseline and everyone else, as well as for instrumental reasons - briefly, freedom is its own good because humans are wired for it; and suppression of speech leads to broken, damaging government.
In any case, small clarification - I do believe that exceptional people in the sense we're discussing exist. But they are far rarer, and the Superhero CEOs we're talking about are not those.
In undergrad one economic history prof basically argued America is just a wider bell curve you overly onto the Canadian bell curve. Left side of the distribution you might consider immigrating from USA to Canada because of the wider social net, very far right side of the bell curve you might do the opposite since the ability to generate and keep economic rewards is much higher in America. Obviously a simplified argument but it sort of makes sense. If you look at Mary Meekers appendix, a good chunk of founder CEOs are foreign or second generation foreign born.
This comment makes no sense at all. The threat which freedom of speech is designed to protect us from is not attacks on exceptionalism, but oppression and control by the hands of a dictatorship. It matters nothing if you feel you're exceptional or you just happen to disagree with anyone in power over any subject, be it critical or irrelevant. What matters is that no one should have the right to deny you the ability to freely express your ideas, because that would represent control over all aspects of your life and existence.
Replace “doesn’t make sense” with “isn’t competitive.” If exceptionalism is a mirage, freedom of speech incurs a cost on a country for no gain. Ceteris paribus others without that drag will have an advantage.
Is your correction supposed to be an improvement? I mean, the statement "If exceptionalism is a fiction, freedom of speech isn't competitive" makes even less sense. It makes no sense at all to talk about freedom of speech incurring a cost. There is absolutely zero cost in not persecuting anyone for having a different opinion.
Of course there is. If anti-vax and anti-mask advocates could be silenced by the state, public health would improve in the short term.
Freedom of speech is effortful to maintain. It takes effort and self control for a society to tolerate opposing views within itself. Forgetting this risks the freedom itself.
Right until the moment we saw how America (society and government) handles pandemics and school shootings.
Even a decade ago, what you said would have been true but now in the medium term, I'll pass :-)
It's a pity.. such an incredibly beautiful country.
This is terrible to say, but you have to (my belief) basically wait for that older generation to die and the newer one to mature to undo the effects of that regime.
There is a crazy game theory degradation when you lose trust and corruption rises. It’s hard to convey just how insidious and broken such a society is. And this is communism, not socialism which appears to be fine based on Western European experience.
One of Mitt Romney’s coworkers at Bain wrote a book a few years ago and France is actually more productive than America and has grown faster, as measured on GDP dollars per capita per hour. Aka they are more productive. Yet USA works like 2100 hours per year and France is closer to 1700, which is why you have the GDP per capita differential.
End of the day, institutions matter.
Sure maybe multiple people could have taken Uber from $100M of revenue to whatever the current day performance is, but at the end of the day it was him and the other two dudes (from the book) that quit their jobs and did it (and raised money from an Internet forum, etc).
This is the whole man in the arena argument by Teddy Rosevelt. Easy to say from far, but probably harder to do; like that old saying that work gets harder the closer you get to actually doing it.
Respectfully.
Regardless of him being a founder or a usurper, I don't think Tesla or SpaceX would have been the businesses they became without Musk. He was the primary driving force behind the initiatives that led to their current day success.
It reminds me of the "but you didn't" argument, said in response to someone looking at a painting or piece of art and saying "I could have done that". Maybe many people could have done for Tesla what Musk has done, but they didn't.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” (1910)
It takes the right guy and the right environment to make that kind of magic happen.
With 1970s tech and only ten times the budget, the Soviet space program certainly innovated a lot more than SpaceX did, in all fields, from computer science to basic physics, to metallurgy, to jet engines, and built more ambitious missions.
Most of the technological achievements of the last century we're done by governments, the private sector was very good at productization of these acievements, but it's inherent shortermist thinking actually stifle innovation.
For example, the idea of reusable rockets with the first stage landing vertically actually originated at NASA in the 70s. It wasn't pursued because realizing it at the time would require a human to guide the descent, which makes it very impractical.
SpaceX applied modern tech to an old concept, a reusable first stage via powered landing. They didn't do that much innovation. Landing a booster was already a solved problem, now the matter was to scale it up and automate it.
It was solved on paper. SpaceX did it.
Note, too, that nobody else was thinking about solving this problem in 2001. Or 2011. Space had become a jobs program per ArianeSpace and ULA.
What SpaceX did was to put a second stage on top of that, scale it up, and make it automatically guided. You're going to have a very, very hard time arguing that this is anywhere even near the level of innovation that NASA or the Soviet space program achieved in a third of the company's lifetime.
As for the stagnation in space, sure. That's the issue with government programs in our current paradigm, they are heavy and the best course of action is seldom taken. Also, for some reason the US has an aversion for SoEs, so NASA, for ideological reasons, wouldn't have been allowed to make their own reusable launch vehicle and make a profit out of it.
What else are you going to do, not try anything?
So yea ironically if you are a Chinese innovator at early stage you might find there’s much less restrictions in China to innovate (not necessarily from moral high ground as long as it’s lucrative ) than the US. Later you become big and draw more attentions but hopefully you know how to play by the rules. I personally don’t think it will make early stage innovation harder
I imagine those scenarios don’t go well for the early innovators unless they themselves have a party sponsor that out ranks the incumbent.
So bribery? Is that what you mean?
I genuinely would not pay attention to one word he says or writes, it bewilders me that anyone does.
Having said that, I think China's concern may at least partly really be regulatory in nature ... or I suspect they would have good reason to be concerned. (I really don't know their motivations)
Ant doesn't like / want to be a pawn shop... kinda makes you wonder what if anything their loans are backed by / what would happen if they grew even bigger and imploded.
Jack Ma is right in pointing out and then proving to us how terribly financialized the world economy has become (it's not just China). The stock market has nothing to do with the economy, it's financial (and political) theatre.
Fwiw that can happen in the US too. If a corporate exec says something unwise during the pre-IPO quiet period, the IPO can potentially be scrapped.
And there other consequences to unwise public statements, like when Elon Musk publicly claimed he had a major new deal, which moved markets and then turned out to be a lie. He got bitch-slapped by the SEC for that.
How can that innovation justify the astronomical risks?
When drawing conclusions, it's a good idea to test theories against hard evidence - BOTH factual and counter factual.
Think tanks are notorious for cherry picking the factual evidence and ignoring inconvenient counter factual evidence due to the nature of their mission. That's the reason think tank reports don't make the grade of peer reviewed articles in prestigious academic journals.
From your on the ground experience, what do you think is the problem?
(1) Very rapid provincial/local government supported innovation and economic expansion across the board with little time for more "big picture" regulatory and risk management frameworks to catch up
(2) a large growth in the number of relatively inexperienced financial market investors created by the expansion who fuel boom and bust market cycles.
What you see is a bit of power balance struggle that is happening as the regulatory and risk management pieces of the government catches up to the expansion and innovation. It's happening across the board - financial, environment, safety, data privacy regulations (ie. companies buying/selling data) etc etc - these headline grabbing actions are one way to build popular support.. not too different from how prosecutors amd regulators operate in the West actually.
"Under non-executive chairman Matt Ridley and Chief Executive Adam Applegarth, Northern Rock had a business plan which involved borrowing heavily in the UK and international money markets, extending mortgages to customers based on this funding, and then re-selling these mortgages on international capital markets, in a process known as securitisation.
On 14 September 2007, the bank sought and received a liquidity support facility from the Bank of England, to replace funds it was unable to raise from the money market. Reporting of this complex scenario led to panic among individual depositors, who feared that their savings might not be available should Northern Rock go into receivership. The result was a bank run – the UK's first in 150 years – where depositors lined up outside the bank to withdraw all of their savings as quickly as possible, particularly since many others were doing the same."
Fabulously successful Chinese businessman criticises China. China government's response: "That's a nice business you got there. Would be a shame if anyfin' were to 'appen to it."
> The outspoken billionaire railed against the Basel Accords, a series of international regulations that require banks to hold a certain amount of capital, as outmoded for the modern era. He also accused Chinese lending institutions of having a “pawnshop” mentality of using collateral instead of advanced credit ratings and watchdogs of not knowing the difference between regulation and supervision.
And on new regulations in draft stage to cover the current gray areas https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN27I1WB:
> While it made no mention of Ant, the draft comes as regulators sharpen their focus on banks that heavily use micro-lenders or third-party technology platforms like Ant for underwriting consumer loans, amid fears of rising defaults and deteriorating asset quality in a pandemic-hit economy.
I derived much of my understanding of Ant not from reporting, but rather, from talking to local sources who are more familiar with the matter. I’m on mobile now so won’t expand on this complex topic... However, if you know the Chinese language you can find plenty of criticisms of Ant’s personal credit/loan products (which, for instance, offer unsecured credit and loans to people with absolutely no income and/or collaterals, like college students, and coupled with aggressive marketing from online marketplaces including Alibaba’s Tmall, lead to hopeless debt cycles); probably less about risky business loans.
- Call you 100 times per day.
- Call you family and your friends and your colleague daily (via contact data collected by their apps)
- Threaten (but not actually do unless you owe them a lot) to sue you, in a way maximizing your stress.
- Visit your family in person and "politely" ask if they know you are in debt.
Google "花呗 催收" or "借呗 催收" then use Google Translate if you want to dig into this.
My dad had to receive money from someone who couldn't repeat their debts and there was an intermediate party that came to talk about everything and propose a plan.
Can’t comment on implementation details since thankfully neither my contacts nor I have experience with collections. (Btw, once upon a time, my Experian credit score dropped by like 150 points after a mysterious debt appeared on my credit report; turns out someone else’s debt was mistakenly put on my file. Luckily my name wasn’t also “mistakenly” sent to some collections agency. Definitely scared the shit out of me.)
This is just me speculating, but what if Jack realized the IPO would be a disaster (for that reason or others) and decided that this was the best strategy to halt it without recourse?
The decision to do so after this PR broadside from Jack Ma appears (to some) as a political statement, and not truly policy-based regulation.
In so many places that's the only way when hotshot businessman's tactics get investigated. Otherwise they wine and dine with top politicians and their brokers. So regulators can't touch them.
However, Ant is operating as a financial company, but without the regulations of a financial company. Meaning that Ant was only keeping 2% of money to back up their loans, and lending out at a 50-to-1 ratio. Whereas financial companies had to keep 30% available.
And there were other news that Ant was merely acting as a finder, and routing the customers to the banks, who took on the financial risk of giving out the loan.
All of it sounds rather risky. Things are good when the good times roll, but what happens when the wheels fall off the car?
Ant’s premise was that they were smart enough to know who were good credit risks, and who wasn’t, by using their AI system to monitor things on your phone, like your battery life, and how quickly you paid your bills.
Things that quite frankly sounds superficial and irrelevant in the greater scheme of things.
The basic question is: What happens when the music stops? Who will be left to pick up the pieces if Ant fails?
It is hard to imagine that Ma did not anticipate the possibility of the regulator reacting to his speech. If he did anticipate, then it becomes part of the plan. If he did not anticipate it, then it would be a mistake.
It might have been a case where Ant has been planning the IPO for some time already, but in the meantime the regulators became determined to rein in the rampant private loan industry. Even though the older generations were renowned for saving, the young generation is being encouraged to borrow like there's no tomorrow, and the situation is becoming a lot like the US. Shadow banking has been a huge problem in China for a few years already (you can easily Google news reports about it). This is a huge risk that the regulators will understandably want to curb, especially given the uncertainty this year. I think it's a case of Ma knowing of this regulatory change but still wanting to salvage the original valuation of the IPO, just as any capitalist would want to try to do, but failed.
So there might be no point in reading too much into it and dismissing the situation to an essentialist argument "because China/CCP, of course this happened...". Sure, in other countries the regulators might not move so resolutely to halt an IPO. But from what we can see the motive is genuine and out of concerns of the crazily leveraged business model, instead of anything dirty or political.
That video gave me a lot of insight into Ma's character, and frankly, the contents of the article were thoroughly unsurprising in that context.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/27/alibabas-jack-ma-has-been-co...
So it’s not everyone but it’s a lot. The actual CCP membership itself is much lower though. It’s more like an octopus in their society.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Ambition-Chasing-Fortune-Truth/dp...
Even without language barrier, I think most of it is just the nature of politics and holding positions of power. It's not like many of us have a very good understanding of the inner workings of the higher cadres in the (D) and (R) parties, or of the leadership teams / boardrooms of large companies either.
As mentioned in the article, the CEOs of the other tech giants Tencent and Baidu are not members. It's simply not a huge deal one way or the other.
Not only that, but there isn't even a singular party of democrats or repulicans. Every state has its own party for each.
People can decide which party they are in and the party itself has no say in the matter.
Absolutely. Political affiliations speak to the philosophy of the CEO and, by proxy, how they'll lead their company. E.g. Palantir is behaving exactly as expected given Peter Thiel's politics.
In Germany my friends spoke very good English, but there were still times they'd sound like the drunken ramblings of a native speaker.
Only later on I'd realize the points they were trying to make and that they were running rings around me intellectually, just having trouble expressing it.
That experience has left me more or less giving a free pass to ESL speakers saying things that sound dumb, especially when it's off the cuff.
To be fair, Jack Ma was an English teacher, has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Hangzhou Teachers University and he was an English lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University. While he may have an accent his communication style is quite clear IMO.
If I thought this was at all a language or communication issue I’d never have posted it.
I agree the points he was making were vapid, and I stopped watching fairly quickly because of it.
Maybe he really is an idiot, but I don't think this video was at all conclusive proof.
You also need to take into account to whom he was saying it. Although they were ostensibly talking to each other, Musk was speaking to the fears of Americans afraid their jobs might get automated, while Ma was addressing Chinese who hope their jobs will get automated.
Consequently, their definition of "smart" is not the same. Musk equates smartness with being good at your job, while Ma thinks it's better to be "street smart" and let someone else do the work for you. Or in the car vs. human example, why try to outrun it if you could be sitting in the driver's seat?
> Then he states that human intelligence comes from the soul anyways.
I thought that was a clever riff on Musk's somewhat awkward "AI means love in Chinese, right?" conversation starter.
> To be fair, Jack Ma was an English teacher, has a Bachelor of Arts in English from Hangzhou Teachers University and he was an English lecturer at Hangzhou Dianzi University. While he may have an accent his communication style is quite clear IMO.
I don't know whether you've ever experienced a foreign-language class taught by a non-native speaker, but I've taken Academic Writing classes in English at a top Chinese university and the quality was terrible. English literacy is rare in China even though it is a mandatory subject, so the bar to becoming a teacher is quite low. Often, they'll have an excellent breadth of vocabulary, while being unfamiliar with many idiomatic expressions and cultural references that come naturally to a native speaker.
That said, I did think he was communicating quite clearly, but since my understanding appears to be quite different from yours, maybe that's just a reflection of our different expectations.
On the other hand, if the event was specifically organized so that they could speak past each other and endear themselves to their respective audiences, it was a genius move.
Oh neat, a pun which works both in Japanese and Chinese.
Why do Chinese want their jobs to be automated?
Of course not all Chinese think like that, but an optimist view of future technology seems much more prevalent in Chinese-language media than in the English-speaking world. Maybe that's because China is still at a relatively low level of industrial automation and trying to catch up to advanced manufacturing economies like Japan or Germany with their "Made in China 2025" initiative.
And the overall optimism doesn't mean there aren't also critical voices, worried that instead it will be the machines controlling the humans who do the work. E.g. Renwu recently published an article about delivery drivers struggling to meet the deadlines set by the system, which you can read translated into English by Jeffrey Ding here: https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-111-algorithms-and-food...
That said, I agree that Jack Ma is far from as technical as Elon Musk, and still consider his spin-off of Alipay (Ant) from Alibaba to be very questionable from a corporate governance standpoint.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/09/technology/business/jack-ma...
For what it's worth this matches my own limited experience from the early 2000s.
Relevant from other comment:
> I don't know whether you've ever experienced a foreign-language class taught by a non-native speaker, but I've taken Academic Writing classes in English at a top Chinese university and the quality was terrible. English literacy is rare in China even though it is a mandatory subject, so the bar to becoming a teacher is quite low. Often, they'll have an excellent breadth of vocabulary, while being unfamiliar with many idiomatic expressions and cultural references that come naturally to a native speaker.
Language barrier is real and I am guessing some English speakers may never understand/empathize with the non-native speakers.
He sounds more like some kind of new age guru or a motivational speaker rather than someone with a good insight into the future.
He's probably in the position he is because he bows down to the CCP.
If you can't say certain things and have the obligation to say others...you could end up making no sense.
https://becominghuman.ai/china-aims-to-be-a-leader-in-ai-by-...
Making money is far more about luck than skill. Always has been. Net worth is not a proxy for ability.
[edit] Don't get me wrong I'm not saying billionaires are idiots. I'm just saying that having a fat stack is not in and of itself a proxy for aptitude. Judge that on the person instead. Just judging them on their bank balance is an unnecessary appeal to authority that hasn't historically held.
Ma, a former English teacher, is one of China’s internet pioneers, building an e-commerce empire with Alibaba and a fintech giant with Ant.Stupid is a loaded word, but you can be a genius in chemistry and not be able to hold a "normal" conversation. You can also be homeless and super-smart.
''He's not stupid. He just has a lot of Alibaba Intelligence.''
Jack Ma had said AI is Alibaba Intelligence
I wasn't surprised when they removed him.
As a member of an EU country, that went full Huwaei in past years regarding 5G, I'm sad that we just gave to Chinese full control over us, technologically speaking.
The Ant IPO has been hotly anticipated. This delay will cost many millions. The regulatory changes, billions.
That these were acceptable costs to reining in Ma over nothing more than public criticism speaks miles to the party’s cost-benefit mindset. For tangible gains it implies few hurdles to extreme consequences for noncompliance.
Just look at what happened to Huawei and Tiktok in the US/West, look at how Facebook is careful in order to prevent action against them, etc.
That's especially true in industries that are seen as strategic (telecommunications, energy, finance, etc). Companies know that and spend a lot of efforts on building and maintaining contacts within governments.
I'm not saying they won't become successful, unfortunately it is only a matter of time until they eclipse the U.S. as the world's biggest economy (having 1.3 billion citizens and not having to waste money on R&D wink wink tends to help also), however they are still holding themselves back and not managing to utilize their full potential.
Letting unregulated finance run rampart isn't a signal of achieving your full potential. It's a fairly new development maybe from the 80s onward.
It is the last stand of him to fight against the authority that torture him fir 1 year and even take alibaba from him. Do not treat the victim as the killer. He was shouting before his dearth.