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Alibaba launches AI search for small biz, says purchase intent jumps

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Alibaba International promotes its e-commerce platform for small businesses at the Canton Fair in Guangdong, China, on Oct. 16, 2024.

Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images

BEIJING — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on Tuesday unveiled an artificial intelligence-powered search engine for small businesses in Europe and the Americas to source supplies.

It’s an attempt to leverage ChatGPT-like tech to increase sales. Initial tests showed businesses’ purchase intent using the new tool increased by 40% versus traditional search engines, according to Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com and vice president of Alibaba International.

The product is called Accio, after the spell used in the Harry Potter fantasy series for summoning objects. The initial version is web-based and supports English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish, according to the company.

With a few text or image prompts, businesses can use Accio to find wholesale products — including analysis on their popularity with consumers and projected profit, according to demos viewed by CNBC.

Examples shown included helping a sports entrepreneur to build a line of pickleball products. At the end of the search, the tool lists a number of procurement options for the business to discuss directly with each supplier.

Pzena IM CEO: Excited about opportunities in China, Japan

The tech uses generative AI from Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen large language model, Zhang said, declining to confirm whether the product integrates AI from other companies.

An LLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on large amounts of data. A model supports generative AI applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts. To be sure, several businesses are still in the experimentation phase with AI and many firms are yet to find a way of monetizing the technology.

Accio uses data from 50 million businesses on Alibaba International’s platform, and publicly available industry information, Zhang said. He said the tool incorporates 1 billion product listings and documents covering industries across more than 100 markets from Alibaba.com, the company’s business-to-business platform which sells to companies outside China.

Businesses based in Europe and North America are the largest group of buyers, the company said.

Alibaba’s international arm in October announced an updated version of an AI translation tool to help merchants reach customers in other countries. The company claimed the tech’s translation capabilities beat that of Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.

The international business has grown rapidly in recent years, but Alibaba’s main revenue driver remains its domestic e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall. In August 2023, management told investors that “the Taobao app has the greatest potential to become a one stop smart portal for life and consumption enabled by AI.”

During the weeks-long Singles Day shopping festival that wrapped up Monday, more than half of over 500 merchants selling on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com used a generative AI-enabled tool, according to a survey by Bain & Company.

Those features include AI for customer service and generating content. The survey found 56% of respondents said AI tools had “high positive impact” on improving productivity.

Alibaba is scheduled to report quarterly results on Friday.

—CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.

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Gary Gensler reviews accomplishments, was ‘proud to serve’ as SEC chair

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U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler testifies before a House Financial Services Committee oversight hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 27, 2023.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler spoke this morning at the Practising Law Institute’s 56th annual conference on securities regulation. 

It sounded awfully close to a farewell speech. 

“It’s a remarkable agency,” Gensler said of the SEC, which he has led since April, 2021.

“It’s been a great honor to serve with them, doing the people’s work, and ensuring that our capital markets remain the best in the world.” 

Gensler reviews accomplishments 

Gensle offered a review of what he has accomplished.  

Most notably, Gensler highlighted the many disclosure rules the SEC has enacted, including disclosure on data breaches, executive pay versus performance and additional disclosures on those seeking to control and buy more than a 5% stake in a company. 

Gensler made only passing reference to his most controversial disclosure rule, on climate change, which has been challenged in court. 

“Congress put in place important provisions about disclosure because information about securities creates a public good,” he said. 

On market structure, Gensler noted he had put in place new rules on central clearing of Treasuries and shortening of the settlement cycle for stocks from two days to one day, and had recently passed rules that allow stocks to be quoted in increments of less than a penny. 

Defense of crypto stance 

Gensler offered a full-throated defense of his approach to crypto. 

Gensler repeated his assertion that while he bitcoin is not a security, the SEC’s focus ” has been on some of the 10,000 or so other digital assets, many of which courts have ruled were offered or sold as securities” and are therefore subject to the SEC’s purview. 

He again asserted anyone offering to sell securities needs to register, and that intermediaries such as broker-dealers, exchanges and clearinghouses also need to be registered. 

He said that the failure to properly police the crypto industry had resulted in “significant investor harm” and that “the vast majority of crypto assets have yet to prove out sustainable use cases.” 

Proud to serve 

Gensler did not say he was resigning, but the tone was clear.

“I’ve been proud to serve with my colleagues at the SEC who, day in and day out, work to protect American families on the highways of finance,” he said at the end of his speech.

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VCs say tech investing is ‘tough’ amid IPO lull and ‘nuts’ AI hype

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Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, and Larry Aschebrook, founder and managing partner of G Squared, speak during a CNBC-moderated panel at Web Summit 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Rita Franca | Nurphoto | Getty Images

LISBON, Portugal — It’s a tough time for the venture capital industry right now as a dearth of blockbuster initial public offerings and M&A activity has sucked liquidity from the market, while buzzy artificial intelligence startups dominate attention.

At the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, two venture investors — whose portfolios include the likes of multibillion-dollar AI startups Databricks Anthropic and Groq — said things have become much more difficult as they’re unable to cash out of some of their long-term bets.

“In the U.S., when you talk about the presidential election, it’s the economy stupid. And in the VC world, it’s really all about liquidity stupid,” Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, an early-stage VC firm based in Silicon Valley, said in a CNBC-moderated panel earlier this week.

Liquidity is the holy grail for VCs, startup founders and early employees as it gives them a chance to realize gains — or, if things turn south, losses — on their investments.

When a VC makes an equity investment and the value of their stake increases, it’s only a gain on paper. But when a startup IPOs or sells to another company, their equity stake gets converted into hard cash — enabling them to make new investments.

Yeung said the lack of IPOs over the last couple of years had created a “really tough” environment for venture capital.

At the same, however, there’s been a rush from investors to get into buzzy AI firms.

“What’s really crazy is in the last few years, OpenAI’s domination has really been determined by Big Techs, the Microsofts of the world,” said Yeung, referring to ChatGPT-creator OpenAI’s seismic $157 billion valuation. OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, which has made a multibillion-dollar investment in the firm.

‘The IPO market is not happening’

Larry Aschebrook, founder and managing partner at late-stage VC firm G Squared, agreed that the hunt for liquidity is getting harder — even though the likes of OpenAI are seeing blockbuster funding rounds, which he called “a bit nuts.”

“You have funds and founders and employees searching for liquidity because the IPO market is not happening. And then you have funding rounds taking place of generational types of businesses,” Aschebrook said on the panel.

As important as these deals are, Aschebrook suggested they aren’t helping investors because even more money is getting tied up in illiquid, privately owned shares. G Squared itself an early backer of Anthropic, a foundational AI model startup competing with Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Using a cooking analogy, Aschebrook suggested that venture capitalists are being starved of lucrative share sales which would lead to them realizing returns. “If you want to cook some dinner, you better sell some stock, ” he added.

Looking for opportunities beyond OpenAI

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