Former Alibaba Vice President Zhang Kaifu: AI has entered the "self-improvement" stage, and a new round of exponential growth may arrive in the next one to two years.

At the "AI × New Finance – Innovation Global Tour Hong Kong Session & Yangtze Starry Plan Launch Conference", Zhang Kaifu, founder of Little Grebe AI and former vice president of Alibaba, stated that the core change in AI over the past year is that models have evolved from chat tools to Agents capable of completing complex tasks continuously. The next stage worth focusing on is that AI will start participating in its own research, training, and inference optimization. Zhang Kaifu noted that this "recursive self-improvement" has already emerged in some studies. If in the future AI can continuously optimize models and training efficiency like top researchers, the pace of technological progress may see another exponential jump, and the next 1 to 2 years could become a key variable for AI development. He also judged that as model capabilities continue to improve, AI Agents will shift from passive response to always-on, active task execution, thereby driving new infrastructure demands in cloud computing, identity authentication, cybersecurity and other fields.