Jack Ma's heavily invested institution has succeeded

Author | Huang Yu

Editor | Zhou Zhiyu

During Jack Ma's most spirited years, he led Alibaba to undertake several initiatives that seemed not so "cost-effective," including the establishment of Hupan University, DAMO Academy, and Luohan Academy.

Jack Ma repeatedly emphasized that if a company's entire resources are only used to make money, then "it is a company without a future." In that narrative, these institutions were endowed with significance beyond the business cycle and were seen as long-term assets that Alibaba left to the world.

In recent years, with Alibaba Group's organizational changes, DAMO Academy has inevitably experienced a convergence of direction and organizational adjustments. Compared to teams like Alibaba Cloud, DAMO Academy seems to be fading from the center stage.

However, at the beginning of 2026, The New York Times published a full-page report that brought DAMO Academy back into the global spotlight. The report introduced the AI model for early screening of pancreatic cancer developed by DAMO Academy—DAMO PANDA, which helps doctors detect potentially missed fatal tumors, saving the lives of several patients.

Such stories are undoubtedly uplifting for the world, not only allowing more ordinary people to see the powerful capabilities of AI in healthcare but also representing another successful case of the real-world application of Chinese AI technology. Additionally, this case helps enhance the global influence of Alibaba's AI technology.

According to Wall Street Watch, the first opponent selected by DAMO Academy's medical AI team in cancer screening research is the "king of cancers"—pancreatic cancer. After several years of foundational research, the team released the DAMO PANDA model in November 2023.

DAMO PANDA constructed the largest CT training set for pancreatic tumors to date and discovered 31 clinically missed lesions from the retrospective validation of 20,530 real-world patients, among which 2 early-stage pancreatic cancer patients have been surgically cured. The related paper was published in the top medical journal Nature Medicine.

Unlike the traditional impression of cancer screening paths that "rely on enhanced CT or invasive examinations," DAMO PANDA is based on a technical route systematically proposed by DAMO Academy—"plain CT + AI."

Plain CT is one of the most widely used imaging examination methods in China's medical system, being low-cost and widely accessible, with grassroots hospitals and county medical institutions also capable of conducting examinations. However, due to limited image contrast, it has long been primarily used for diagnosing diseases such as lung nodules, fractures, and stones.

With the accumulation of large-scale data and the development of deep learning technology, the research team at DAMO Academy found that AI can identify subtle density differences in plain CT images that are easily overlooked by the human eye, thereby uncovering more valuable disease clues.

The significance of this approach lies in that it does not attempt to introduce an expensive, complex, and difficult-to-popularize new examination method into the medical system, but rather embeds itself into existing processes, gaining additional health clues from "examinations that patients are already required to undergo." According to calculations by DAMO Academy, screening for the seven major mainstream cancers (lung cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, esophageal cancer) using traditional methods such as ultrasound, CT, gastroscopy, and colonoscopy costs at least 3,000 yuan, while the cost of "one scan for multiple screenings" based on plain CT + AI is less than 200 yuan, providing a realistic possibility for large-scale screening of asymptomatic populations.

At the same time, DAMO PANDA does not exist in isolation. Over the past two years, DAMO Academy has clearly identified medical AI as one of its core focus areas. In addition to pancreatic cancer, the team has made a series of research breakthroughs in high-incidence cancers such as esophageal cancer, stomach cancer, colorectal cancer, and liver cancer, as well as chronic diseases and emergencies like osteoporosis, fatty liver, and acute aortic syndrome, with multiple results published in Nature Medicine.

In June 2025, DAMO Academy also jointly released the world's first AI model for gastric cancer imaging screening, DAMO GRAPE, in collaboration with Zhejiang Provincial Cancer Hospital.

In the first ten years after Alibaba's establishment, Jack Ma did not allow anyone within the company to mention the establishment of a research institute or R&D department. Because for Alibaba during those ten years, the daily concern was about survival, "we must have good products and good services, and only with profitability can we move forward."

After Alibaba turned 18, with over 20,000 technical talents and more than 500 million users, Jack Ma began to think more long-term, and the first major decision he considered was to establish DAMO Academy in October 2017.

DAMO Academy is dedicated to solving issues related to technology and research that promote productivity. At that time, Ant Group also promised to invest 100 billion yuan in DAMO Academy over three years.

However, in the past three years, against the backdrop of major organizational changes within Alibaba Group, DAMO Academy has also undergone multiple adjustments and reshuffles. The previously rich "4+X" research fields have been reduced to "intelligent + computing," with the intelligent direction including medical AI, decision intelligence, video technology, embodied intelligence, and genetic intelligence, while the computing direction includes computing technology, RISC-V, etc.

Clearly, after the adjustments, some of DAMO Academy's previously vague, long-cycle, and difficult-to-implement projects have been split, shrunk, or even terminated. What has been retained is not the most cutting-edge concepts or those with the greatest imaginative potential, but rather those that have already been validated in the real world, can be integrated into existing systems, and form stable positive feedback.

In this sense, medical AI has become one of the most stable and sustainable directions for DAMO Academy in the past two years. Unlike frontier fields such as autonomous driving and quantum computing, which require huge investments and have highly uncertain commercialization paths, medical AI was embedded in specific application scenarios from the beginning: hospitals, health check centers, and grassroots medical institutions.

According to Wall Street News, in addition to the DAMO Academy AI team, Alibaba's current AI-related organizational structure also includes Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Intelligent Information Business Group, and AI teams from various business departments. Among them, Alibaba Cloud is currently the core platform for the implementation of Alibaba's AI technology and the main vehicle for commercialization, focusing on AI infrastructure construction + large models + B-end commercialization.

The positioning of DAMO Academy has also become clearer — as the group's forefront research center, it undertakes long-term but potentially socially valuable technological exploration tasks. While Alibaba emphasizes commercial efficiency and cash flow, and as "poetry and distance" are continuously compressed under real-world pressures, DAMO Academy seems to persist in doing things that can truly benefit humanity