Alibaba Pictures President Says Don’t Give Up
“All the talk these days is about artificial intelligence and what machines will be able to do in 20 years,” Alibaba Pictures President Wei Zhang says, from her penthouse office in Southern California with sweeping views of the San Gabriel Mountains. “Increasingly, people realize that it’s really the creative and emotional side of humans that machines cannot easily replicate.” Timeless themes are on Zhang’s mind these days as she tries to steer Alibaba Pictures—the film unit of China’s biggest e-commerce company—into a technologically evolving future. She set up shop in the Los Angeles area in 2016, tasked by CEO Jack Ma to develop Alibaba’s entertainment business and find stories to share with the content-hungry audience in China, soon to be the largest movie market in the world. Alibaba then invested and entered into a partnership with Steven Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment. That was in 2016, at the height of feverish Hollywood-China deal making, ...