Al isn't the rival, the person who masters it is: Ant Group CTO

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

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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 Al 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 (Gen AI), the version that powers popular chatbots like 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.

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.