Alibaba Founder Jack Ma on AI and Children’s Education

At an event of the Jack Ma Foundation’s Rural Teachers Program, Jack Ma—who has kept a low public profile for a long time—joined the “Laba Gathering” online, congratulated the selected teachers, and shared some of his thoughts on AI. The program was the foundation’s first public-interest initiative after its establishment, and to date it has supported 1,101 rural teachers.

Below is Jack Ma’s comment:

While AI poses challenges to rural education, it also offers an opportunity to return to the essence of education itself. In the age of AI, the question is no longer whether to use AI, but how to teach our children to use it well. With AI, education should no longer train children to compete with machines in calculation and memory, but to stay curious—because curiosity is the true source of computing power.

The real divide in the AI era is not a technological gap, but a gap in curiosity, imagination, creativity, judgment, and the ability to collaborate. In the AI era, education should not focus on making children memorize more or recite more, but on helping them think in more interesting, creative, and distinctive ways. And instead of having a thousand students produce the same correct answer, education in the AI era should teach a thousand students how to ask ten thousand different good questions.