A farcical situation with multiple losses

Author | Liu Baodan

Editor | Huang Yu

A few months ago, 17-year-old Jiang Ping ranked 12th in the preliminary round of the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition, rising to fame and attracting national attention. Controversy followed.

Months later, the situation took a turn. On November 3rd, the organizing committee of the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition released a statement announcing that the list of winners for the 2024 competition had been officially published, with 86 participants awarded. However, a teacher from Lianshui Vocational School in Jiangsu Province, Wang XX, and the student he mentored both made it to the finals but did not win any awards.

The statement indicated that Wang XX provided assistance to his student during the preliminary round, violating the rule prohibiting "discussion with others."

The statement did not mention Jiang Ping's name. From being a 17-year-old vocational school student from a rural area to a "genius girl" emerging in the mathematics competition, Jiang Ping's life underwent a dramatic change in just a few months, swept up by the wave of attention.

Behind the incident, there are loopholes in the competition's rules. It was introduced that the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition was initiated by Jack Ma in 2018 and is co-hosted by Alibaba Public Welfare and Damo Academy, aiming to inspire people's love for mathematics through competition. This year marks the sixth edition. In terms of process, the scores from the preliminary round determine the finalists for the finals, where gold, silver, and other rankings are awarded, with a gold prize of $30,000.

In this process, the preliminary round serves as a screening for participants, using an open-book exam format that allows reference to online/offline materials and the use of programming software for answering questions, but prohibits discussion with others and sharing of exam questions. The crucial finals, however, are a closed-book exam that requires participants to answer in front of a camera.

Analysts believe this is a global competition designed to attract those interested in mathematics, and the preliminary round does not set a high threshold, making it difficult to invest significant financial resources for supervision. The real battleground is the finals, while the preliminary round is merely to qualify for the finals.

According to the investigation, Wang XX and others violated the rules in the preliminary round, with no mention of Jiang Ping. Public opinion generally believes she should not bear greater blame in this incident.

The organizing committee of the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition issued an apology in the statement, stating, "This also exposes issues such as the competition system being insufficiently refined and management being not rigorous enough. We sincerely apologize for this!"

After this incident, the business and events of Damo Academy will continue. Over the past few years, the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition has been a reflection of the company's social responsibility, and this incident has brought renewed attention to the current situation of Damo Academy.

Damo Academy carries Alibaba's poetry and aspirations. At the 2017 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba announced the establishment of a new technology research institute called Damo Academy. Jack Ma stated that Alibaba would invest 100 billion yuan as startup capital for Damo Academy over the next three years, but it would need to earn money on its own in the future.

Jack Ma hopes that Damo Academy will outlast Alibaba, whose vision is to become a good company that lasts 102 years. He believes that companies in the 21st century can only survive by solving social problems, and the primary task of Damo Academy is basic scientific research and disruptive technology research.

However, this is destined to be a challenging and difficult exploratory path. As it stands today, Damo Academy carries Alibaba's most optimistic expectations during its glory days The year 2017, when Damo Academy was established, was a year of rapid development for Alibaba. That year, Alibaba's GMV reached 3.767 trillion yuan, and in October, the company's market value exceeded 470 billion USD, making it the largest e-commerce company in the world. At that time, Pinduoduo was still a small company that had been established for two years, and Douyin had only been online for a little over a year.

According to Zhang Jianfeng, the first president of Damo Academy and Alibaba's CTO at the time, Damo Academy aimed to build a first-class research team to develop core technologies, and then create a carrier (product). If the product succeeded, it could leverage Alibaba's platform to achieve significant influence, which was the standard for Damo Academy's work.

Zhang Jianfeng listed three key research directions for Damo Academy: quantum computing, chips, and machine learning. He hoped that Damo Academy could produce disruptive technological innovations similar to electricity and computers.

However, not long after, Pinduoduo and Douyin e-commerce rose strongly, and the competitive pressure on Alibaba's core e-commerce business continued to increase. As a result, in March 2023, Alibaba underwent an unprecedented structural split, dividing into six parts, with its businesses starting to compete independently in the market.

Strategically, Alibaba began to focus on e-commerce and Alibaba Cloud. Against this backdrop, Damo Academy inevitably entered a period of turbulence, and its once prosperous scene gradually dimmed.

First, in terms of personnel, starting in 2022, senior technical executives such as Hua Xiansheng, Tan Ping, and Jin Rong gradually left. Hua Xiansheng had served as the head of Alibaba's Damo Academy City Brain, while Tan Ping had previously been the head of the XR Lab at Damo Academy and had earlier served as the chief scientist for computer vision at the artificial intelligence lab.

In terms of business, starting in 2023, Damo Academy successively divested its quantum laboratory and autonomous driving business. In November of last year, Damo Academy donated its quantum laboratory and transferable quantum experimental instruments and equipment to Zhejiang University. Quantum computing was one of the earliest research directions targeted by Damo Academy, which established two hardware laboratories, Lab-1 and Lab-2, with full-stack development capabilities for quantum computing software and hardware.

Moving forward, Damo Academy will continue to focus on medium- to long-term scientific and technological research, with a key layout in cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence and integrated circuits. One unresolved issue is how to find the optimal solution between profitability and scientific research.

After seven years of development, Damo Academy has once again returned to the public eye. The Jiang Ping incident was just an episode, and Damo Academy, which aims to accelerate the exchange of scientific and industrial knowledge, still faces greater challenges to confront and resolve