Ideas Weave Every Narrative with AI.
Alibaba just banned Claude and GPT internally, forcing 100,000 employees onto their own AI models. This isn’t a compliance move — it’s a brutal but brilliant product strategy. Dogfooding creates a high-density, zero-delay feedback loop that turns employee frustration into the most valuable product data. The short-term morale hit is the down payment on long-term market dominance.
AI isn’t replacing your specific job; it’s dismantling the century-old concept of the ‘job’ itself. Because coordination is now cheap, the bundled package of tasks we call a role is obsolete. The real threat is to middle managers, and companies that just cut headcount without rebuilding accountability are doomed to fail.
Hangzhou’s tech ecosystem didn’t die under China’s crackdown — it evolved. By pruning consumer-internet bloat, the city’s Alibaba alumni network pivoted hard to foundational AI. The result: open-source models from DeepSeek that rival OpenAI, proving that regulatory pressure and Western sanctions inadvertently fertilize the most dangerous deep-tech sectors.