AI isn’t the rival, the person who masters it is: Ant Group CTO

[SINGAPORE] Ant Group’s chief technology officer (CTO) He Zhengyu is convinced of one thing: Artificial intelligence (AI) is not the enemy.

The real threat, he said, is the person who learns to use it faster and better than you do.

He likened it to the early days of Google search: Those who refused to use the search engine did not beat the system – they simply fell behind the curve and caught up later.

“Don’t see AI as an opponent that will replace you,” he said while addressing some 300 attendees at the recent Singapore National Employers Federation employers’ summit. “Otherwise, you will lose the competition – not against AI, but the people who actually master AI.”

It is a view he has been sharing with growing zeal as he leads his team at the Chinese fintech giant to “focus 200 per cent on AI”, especially on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI is the still-hypothetical next frontier of AI – one that could learn and reason across domains like a human being. This goes beyond generative AI (GenAI), the version that powers popular chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, which can create text, visuals and code by mimicking patterns found in human-generated content.

“We started to look into the foundational models before ChatGPT was well known... and used them internally, but we never thought it would become such a huge thing,” he told The Straits Times, after candidly admitting that his firm had initially underestimated the impact of Gen AI.

But it is “never too late to join the game”, he said.

A child prodigy

Dr He, who is 40, joined Ant Group in 2018 and was appointed CTO in 2023. The company is the Alibaba affiliate behind the ubiquitous mobile payment platform Alipay.

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Born to an accountant father and a mathematics teacher mother, the Hunan native was gifted in numbers from a young age. He entered a fiercely competitive programme designed to fast-track students into university, and by 15 was pursuing an engineering degree at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

Being the youngest in his class and his dorm, he was often treated as the kid brother – barred from adult activities such as going to the bar and hanging out with girls.

During his rebellious teenage years, he asked to quit the programme. “I told my mum I wanted to go to a design school. I like drawing pictures.”

But his mother said he had to complete college before they could revisit his idea, so he complied. And once he took his studies seriously, he learnt that he could excel with ease.

He stayed in the same college to earn a master’s degree, and went on to the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. There, he graduated with a PhD in computer engineering, scored an internship at Google and became a full-time software engineer at the tech giant.

After six years, a recruiter from Ant Group reached out to him with a “pretty good offer” and the lure of a new challenge in a big market, which drew him back to China.

His homecoming came with a reverse culture shock. In the US, working relationships stopped after office hours; but in China, colleagues party together after giving 100 per cent to their work, he said.

“The ‘996 culture’ really shocked me,” he said, referring to the gruelling 9 am to 9 pm, six-day-a-week work norm that some Chinese companies are known for.

But over time, he came to appreciate that without such disciplined and diligent workers, China’s tech firms would not have achieved rapid progress.

By contrast, he felt some Silicon Valley companies are “suffering” because they hire employees who seem more into hitting the gym or playing table tennis in the office than getting real work done. “I don’t think that’s sustainable, right?”

Talent development

At Ant Group, not only is Dr He the AI evangelist, but he is also a strong advocate for talent development. He has been interviewing some 100 promising candidates from around the world over the past six months or so. One of his stops included Singapore, where he met fresh graduates at the International Conference on Learning Representations in April.

To him, a real tech company is not one that is just rich enough to hire the top talent. “It’s about whether we can train a top scientist or research engineer ourselves,” he said, citing Google’s success in nurturing Nobel Prize winners as his source of inspiration.

This is why he believes in immersing his fresh hires in rigorous training, connecting them with the best professors, giving them the best equipment, tossing them the hardest problems, and encouraging them to achieve something remarkable.

As for the rest of the staff – whether they are engineers, designers, or those from the legal, human resources or logistics department – all of them have access to “the best AI tools” to help them with their work. There is no resistance to the technology in his team, and the adoption rate is high, he said.

But acknowledging that AI can produce buggy code and even deepfakes, he said his team has also developed AI tools to detect these issues. “We are using the technology on both sides... using AI to fight AI.”

Ant Group’s focus in the next decade is to build the digital infrastructure for the service economy using “reliable, compliant and inclusive AI”, Dr He said.

The company has made some headway – most notably with its AI-powered healthcare app AQ, which has reached 10 million users in three months, he said. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Dr He believes AI can meet many more human needs at far lower costs in the future.

Future of jobs

Every industrial revolution creates winners and losers. For those outside the tech sphere who fear being left out, Dr He’s advice is simple: Co-create with AI.

“Even for engineers like me, I still have a need for writing... and preparing slides,” he said, noting that AI is especially useful for checking his spelling and phrasing since he is not a native English speaker. “But I’m not letting AI decide the point I want to make.”

“See it as co-creation... AI and you are the two co-founders of a company,” he said. “Everything should be signed off by all founders, not just one of them.”

Dr He also does not believe certain professions are inherently more vulnerable to AI than others. He recalled an earlier prediction that truck drivers would be replaced by autonomous vehicles, which has not come true because drivers do much more than driving. They pump petrol, clean the truck and guard the goods – tasks that software cannot perform yet.

“For each profession, there are certain parts of the work that can be automated or replaced by AI, but not all of it,” he said.

He added that humans still have a clear edge in adaptability. “When you go to a different country or workplace, you have to adapt in one week or two, right? But AI cannot. It needs massive retraining.”

Education should evolve too, he said. Instead of restricting students from using AI in assignments and exams, it is better to design a new system that allows both professors and students to harness AI for higher productivity.

As for companies that are still on the fence about AI or do not know where to start, his advice is: Just buy a subscription plan, start using it and learn by doing. THE STRAITS TIMES