Ant Group
privateAnt Group is the fintech giant behind Alipay (1B+ users), spun off from Alibaba in 2011 and rebranded from Ant Financial in 2020. After its record $37B IPO was suspended by Chinese regulators in November 2020, the company pivoted heavily into AI research. Alibaba holds 32.65% but ties have been loosening, with Ant's AI research operating independently.
AI is spearheaded by the Inclusion AI (IAI) team, producing the Ling Family with three pillars: Ling (general LLM, now at 1T parameters), Ring (reasoning — Ring-2.5-1T scored Gold Medal on IMO 2025), and Ming (multimodal — Ming-Flash-Omni-2.0 is the first model unifying speech, audio, and music in a single architecture). The team also produced LLaDA, the first 100B-parameter diffusion language model (an alternative to autoregressive generation), achieving 2.1x faster inference.
Ant Group is one of the world's top contributors to CNCF and Linux Foundation projects, winning the CNCF Top End User Award in 2025. Open-source infrastructure includes OceanBase (distributed database), SecretFlow (privacy-preserving computing), CodeFuse (code generation), and Kata Containers. The company has elevated AI-powered healthcare as a core business, acquiring Haodf.com and launching the AQ healthcare app (100M users within a month).
People
- He Zhengyu (何征宇) — CTO & VP (AI oversight); InclusionAI operates under CTO's office (formerly PhD Georgia Institute of Technology (GPU Max-flow algorithms))
- Zhenzhong Lan (兰振中) Google Scholar — Director, AGI Research Center; Tenured Associate Professor, Westlake University (formerly Google (Research Scientist, 2018-2020, created ALBERT); PhD Carnegie Mellon University (2017); BS Sun Yat-sen University (2010))
- Jun Zhou (周俊) — Senior Research Leader (cross-cutting; appears on all major product lines)
- Ziqi Liu — Research Lead, Ling Language Model (formerly PhD Shanghai Jiao Tong University; ~8 years at Ant Group)
- Tiwei Bie — Lead, LLaDA (industry side)
- Qingpei Guo — Technical Lead, Ming Multimodal
- Richard Bian (卞思康) — Product & Growth Lead, Ant Ling & InclusionAI (formerly Microsoft; Square; 11 years software engineering in US; Executive MBA UC Berkeley Haas (2018-2021))
- Yi Wu — AReaL RL Team (academic lead); Assistant Professor, Tsinghua IIIS (formerly OpenAI (researcher); PhD UC Berkeley (advised by Stuart Russell))
News
- 2025-11-12 Interview: Ant Group's Open Model Ambitions — Interconnects