In his first public sighting in China in over a year, Alibaba founder Jack Ma visited his hometown of Hangzhou to discuss the future of education at the Alibaba-funded Yungu School on Monday, according to a WeChat post from Yungu Education. Ma claimed that technologies such as ChatGPT have brought challenges to traditional education, but that we are still only in the beginning of the AI era. He also called for the practice of artificial intelligence to focus on problem solving. Although human physical and mental strength are inferior to machines, Ma told school officials, machines only have a “chip-core”, and humans have a “heart”. After a long absence following Ant Financial’s aborted IPO in late 2020, Ma’s appearance comes as China’s government attempts to improve relations with tech enterprises in the hope of reviving a sluggish economy. [Yungu Education, in Chinese]