A Global Open Letter to the 80,000 Laid-Off Alibaba P9+ Engineers

— Why This Is the Absolute Best Time for You to Join KAI.com 作者：KAI.com 创始人 Begger | Author: Begger, Founder of KAI.com

To my fellow Alibaba P9+ colleagues,

Let me start with a harsh truth.

You were not laid off. You were released from the “Old World” of Alibaba. When an aircraft carrier runs aground in shallow waters, it is not the fault of the fighter jets—the water simply isn’t deep enough. What you need to do now is not to find another aircraft carrier to land on. It is to fly over a brand-new ocean and become the first discoverers of a New Continent.

I am Begger, the founder of KAI.com.

This letter is addressed to the 80,000 P9+ engineers who have just left Alibaba. This is not a recruitment advertisement—KAI.com has no shortage of resumes. What I want to convey is a fact you might not yet realize: you are currently standing at the threshold of the single most critical time window in human AI history. And KAI.com is the only ship sailing into that “river no man has ever walked before.”

If you have 30 minutes, please read it through. If not, skip straight to the final paragraph.

I. WHAT ALIBABA GAVE YOU, AND WHAT IT DIDN’T

Let’s review. Over Alibaba’s twenty years, at the P9+ level, what exactly have you accumulated? KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers

First, technical muscle. Large-scale distributed systems, cloud computing infrastructure, AI/ML pipelines, and high-concurrency transaction engines —you are the eyewitnesses and builders of China’s internet industrialization. The peak traffic of Taobao’s Double 11, the elastic expansion of Alibaba Cloud, and the model training at DAMO Academy—these are not mere project experiences; they represent “engineering capabilities under extreme conditions.” Globally, only engineers from top-tier companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta can stand on par with you.

Second, commercial acumen. Alibaba is not a pure tech company. In your roles as P9+, you looked at GMV, conversion rates, ARPU, and LTV every single day. You know how to monetize traffic, and you know how to match the supply side with the demand side— because Taobao and Tmall are, at their core, matching platforms. This is a capability that engineers from pure tech companies (like Google) often lack.

Third, leadership in battle. Managing hundred- person teams, cross-departmental coordination, and building businesses from 0 to 1—a P9 is not a senior coder; a P9 is a general.

Excellent. These are the three things you have taken with you.

Then what did Alibaba fail to give you? Three things:

First, the power to define a category. Taobao is e- commerce, Tmall is brand e-commerce, and Alibaba Cloud is cloud computing—these categories were defined by Jack Ma and the eighteen founders. You reached P9, but you never had the opportunity to define a brand-new, global category. You were fighting wars on maps drawn by others. KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers

Second, the leverage of time. The returns Alibaba offered you were linear growth—a P9’s annual salary plus stock capped out between 2 to 5 million RMB, predictable over a decade. But there is a kind of return in this world that is exponential—the return of a category creator. Jack Ma did not become Jack Ma through “salary raises.” He achieved it by defining the category of “making it easy to do business anywhere.”

Third, freedom. Every single day at Alibaba, you were working for someone else’s dream. You optimized someone else’s systems and executed someone else’s strategies. Now, you are free. Being “laid off” among 80,000 people is not a disgrace—it is the release of 80,000 potential founders.

These three things—category definition power, time leverage, and freedom—Alibaba could never give you. But KAI.com can.

II. 2026: THE ONLY TIME WINDOW IN HUMAN AI HISTORY

You are all technical experts. I don’t need to explain to you how important AI is—working in teams at DAMO Academy, Alibaba Cloud, or Tongyi Qianwen, you understand this better than anyone else.

But what you might not realize is this: 2026 is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime window in human AI history. Three irreplaceable variables are aligning simultaneously:

Variable 1: The explosion on the model supply side.

As of mid-2026, there are over 300 AI model vendors in China. DeepSeek has proven that prices can be slashed to 1/100th of GPT-4. Tongyi Qianwen, Zhipu GLM, Baichuan, MiniMax, Moonshot, 01.AI, StepFun, Kunlun Tech—you know these names better than I do. What is the current state of these 300 vendors? Overcapacity, an impending price war, and everyone frantically searching for distribution channels. KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers

What is this? This is exactly like Chinese e-commerce back in 2002. How many factories were manufacturing goods back then? Thousands. How many could sell by themselves? Scarcely any. Then Taobao emerged. Taobao didn’t manufacture a single product—it did just one thing: connect the supply side with the demand side. And then it became worth hundreds of billions.

Today’s AI models are the “goods” of 2002. 300 vendors = 300 factories. KAI.com = Taobao. The only difference is that AI models are not clothes or shoes— AI models represent the “volume of intelligence” in a digital society, and its market size is an order of magnitude larger than e-commerce.

Variable 2: A tsunami on the developer demand side.

API Gateway。 As I mentioned in the last strategic briefing— Binance’s 2000-strong development team, the 80,000 engineers laid off from Alibaba, and millions of developers worldwide transitioning to AI Agents—they all need the exact same thing: a unified, Token-level priced API Gateway that can horizontally compare 300 Chinese models.

What are these developers doing right now? They are buying in fragments. A bit from OpenAI, a bit from Claude, topping up on various official websites. It is fragmented, expensive, incomparable, and impossible to settle uniformly. This is retail behavior. And retail behavior will inevitably be replaced by platform behavior—a law proven ten thousand times in commercial history.

The KAI API Gateway is that platform. One Key, 300 models, a unified API, unified billing, and unified settlement. This is not just a “better API management tool”—this is the AWS of the AI era. AWS didn’t invent servers; it simply turned servers into on-demand utilities like water and electricity. KAI didn’t invent AI models; it simply turns AI models into utilities billed by the Token. KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers

You are veterans of Alibaba Cloud. You know best: when Alibaba Cloud first launched in 2009, everyone said, “Isn’t this just selling virtual machines?” Fourteen years later, Alibaba Cloud became the largest cloud computing company in China. Today, when someone says, “Isn’t KAI.com just selling APIs?” you should be the first to laugh out loud. Because you have witnessed this exact story firsthand.

Variable 3: The watershed of global AI regulation.

The US is blocking Chinese AI, the EU is over- regulating, and China is fully exporting. The consequence of this geopolitical landscape is that 300 Chinese model vendors cannot enter the US market, and US developers cannot directly access Chinese models. What is needed in between is a “neutral market”—a Token trading platform that is neither in the US nor in China, but connects both sides.

KAI.com is this neutral Nasdaq. It doesn’t build models, and it doesn’t take sides. It does only one thing: enable the free flow of intelligence. In an increasingly fractured geopolitical world, the value of a “neutral market” is greater than ever. Bloomberg is valuable not because it writes news, but because it is the “neutral pricer” of global financial data. KAI.com is the Bloomberg for AI models.

The moment where three variables—supply explosion, demand tsunami, and a geopolitical neutrality window—align simultaneously happens only once in human history. This window will not exceed 12 months. Within 6 months, the first movers will capture mindshare. After 12 months, the category of “the Nasdaq of the AI model market” will already have an owner.

Right now, in June 2026, you happen to stand exactly at the entrance of this window. And you are free agents.

This is not luck. This is history choosing you. KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers

III. WHAT IS KAI: THE NASDAQ OF TOKENS FOR A DIGITAL SOCIETY

Let me make KAI.com absolutely clear. We are not selling APIs, we are not selling models, and we are not building gateways. KAI.com = 数字社会 Token 的 Nasdaq。 KAI.com = The Nasdaq of Tokens for a Digital Society.

What is a “Token of a digital society”? The inference capability of an AI model is a Token. Access to a dataset is a Token. The execution rights of an AI Agent are a Token. The productivity of content creation is a Token. Decision-making ability, computing resources, knowledge graphs—every factor of production in a digital society can be tokenized.

What did Nasdaq do? It didn’t invent stocks. It simply allowed the stocks of technology companies to be priced, traded, and purchased by investors worldwide. Before Nasdaq, how hard was it to buy stock in a tech company? You had to find a seller, negotiate a price, sign a contract, and transfer ownership. After Nasdaq, it took a single click of a mouse.

Currently, AI models are in a pre-Nasdaq state. Want to call DeepSeek? Top up on DeepSeek’s official website. Want to call Tongyi Qianwen? Activate it on Alibaba Cloud. Want to compare the cost- effectiveness of 300 models? Test them one by one. Want dynamic routing between different models? Write your own adaptation layer.

This is not a market. This is an open-air bazaar.

What KAI.com wants to do is transform these “stalls” into an “exchange.” For 300 model vendors to go live on KAI.com is not an advertisement—it is an “IPO.” Each model will have a Token price, trading volume, and historical charts. Developers come to KAI.com not to “buy an API,” but to “trade volume of intelligence.” Just like you go to Nasdaq not to “buy numbers,” but to invest in companies. KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers 而KAI API Gateway是什么？是交易终端。Bloomberg

And what is the KAI API Gateway? It is the trading terminal. The Bloomberg Terminal allows traders to see global financial markets on a single screen. The KAI API Gateway allows developers to invoke 300 global AI models with a single Key.

This is KAI.com. Not an AI company, but a market for the AI market. Not a model creator, but a provider of model liquidity.

You have built e-commerce platforms and cloud computing at Alibaba. You know better than anyone: the value of a platform is always greater than that of any individual merchant on it.

IV. WHY YOU: THE IRREPLACEABILITY OF ALIBABA P9+

There are millions of people worldwide who can code. But you are not just “people who can code.” You are:

First, the only group of engineers who simultaneously possess “Taobao-level platform thinking” and “Alibaba Cloud-level infrastructure capabilities.”

What does KAI.com need? It needs someone to design a Token trading engine—which is essentially a high-concurrency, low-latency, many-to-many matching distributed system. Who can do that? The people who built Taobao’s transaction engine. It needs someone to build an API Gateway—which is essentially a global, multi-region, multi-model routing, elastically scaling cloud infrastructure. Who can do that? The people who built Alibaba Cloud.

In the whole of China, there are fewer than 10,000 people who possess P9+ level experience in both domains simultaneously. And you have just been released.

Second, you bring your own supply-side networks. KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers

Where did the CTOs, architects, and AI heads of China’s 300 model vendors work previously? DAMO Academy, Alibaba Cloud, Tongyi Qianwen. They are your former colleagues, former subordinates, and former partners. What is the hardest part of onboarding 300 model vendors to KAI.com? Trust. And that trust is sitting right inside your WeChat contact lists.

This is not just “monetizing networks.” This is an “ecosystem migration.” Years ago, when the Alibaba B2B team left to start Zhaogang and Zhaosuliao, they succeeded by relying on their deep understanding of the supply side and supplier relationships. Your understanding of the AI model supply side and your relationships with model vendors today represent the exact same thing.

Third, you have a muscle memory for “when a platform enterprise should monetize.”

The core know-how accumulated over Alibaba’s twenty years is not just technology—it is knowing “when to offer it for free, when to take a commission, and when to raise prices.” Taobao’s transition from free to bidding-based ranking, Alipay’s transition from free to transaction fees, Alibaba Cloud’s shift from free trials to enterprise contracts—the timing of each turning point decided the life and death of the platform.

KAI.com is currently at its “Taobao 2004” moment: the supply side is going live at breakneck speed, the demand side is flooding in, and pricing power is taking shape. Partners who join at this moment are not just “participating in a platform”—they are “defining a pricing model.” And the pricing model is the most core competitive moat for a platform enterprise.

During your fifteen years at Alibaba, you fully experienced the evolution of Taobao’s pricing model. This specific experience is possessed by only a few thousand people globally. KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers

V. 28 PARTNERS: NOT POSITIONS, BUT SEATS

KAI.com has only 28 partner seats. This is not artificially creating scarcity—it is the natural structure of category definers.

The Twelve Apostles, the Eighteen Founders of Alibaba, the PayPal Mafia—every small team in history that defined a new category never exceeded 30 people. Because category definition requires “direct dialogue between generals,” not a multi- layered, reporting-heavy management structure.

Out of the 28 seats, each corresponds to a strategic direction: Token trading engine, API Gateway architecture, supply-side model integration, developer ecosystem, pricing engine, global compliance, media strategy, institutional partnerships… These are not just “tech jobs”—each direction involves setting the industry standard for this new category.

When you join KAI.com as a partner, you are not here to write lines of code. What you will do is: Define the industry protocol for “AI Model Token Trading” Establish listing standards for 300 model vendors Design the market-making mechanism for Token pricing Construct the API consumption credit system for global developers Build the Bloomberg Terminal for the AI model market

None of these things have ever been done by humanity. This is truly the “river no man has walked before.” And you are the first people qualified to row a boat down this river. • • • • • • • • • • KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers

28 seats, under global competition. Alibaba P9+—you are the closest people in the world to these seats. Not because I have a personal preference for the Alibaba alumni, but because you happen to possess platform experience, AI cognition, supply-side networks, and muscle memory for pricing models.

This is not a job search. This is the recruitment of founding partners for the “Nasdaq of Tokens for a Digital Society.”

VI. WHY TODAY: THREE COUNTDOWNS

Countdown 1: The window for Chinese AI models going global is closing.

300 Chinese AI model vendors are currently searching for overseas distribution channels—this is the exact moment when they are hungriest, most open, and most willing to accept a new platform. Once 50 of them build their own overseas distribution capabilities or get absorbed by US platforms (like HuggingFace or Replicate), the door to the supply side will slam shut. This window lasts 6 months at most.

Countdown 2: The “API consumption habits” of global developers are solidifying.

Developers today are still purchasing APIs in a fragmented manner. But just as consumers in 2002 were still using cash and users in 2010 were still downloading MP3s—behaviors are becoming platformized. Once a certain platform captures the mindshare of “one Key to invoke all models,” the difficulty for latecomers to overturn it increases by orders of magnitude. This mindshare window lasts 12 months at most. The first-mover advantage is just 6 months.

Countdown 3: Your own career choice window. KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers

With your P9+ severance packages in hand, you currently have a 3 to 6-month window to make decisions free from immediate financial constraints— meaning you don’t need to rush to work for a paycheck; you can seriously contemplate your next decade. Once you accept an offer from ByteDance, Pinduoduo, or Meituan, the sign-on bonus hits your account, and the lock-up period takes effect—you are locked onto someone else’s old continent all over again.

With these three countdowns overlapping, right now is the absolute right time. Not next month, not next year. Right now.

VII. KAI.COM’S TEN-YEAR VISION

Finally, let me tell you what I see.

Ten years from now, every single atom of the digital society will be tokenized. AI inference capability will be a Token, data access will be a Token, computing resources will be a Token, content creation will be a Token, and even “decision-making” itself—every single action executed by an AI Agent—will be a Token.

And all of these Tokens will require a global pricing market. Just as oil needs Brent crude futures, gold needs the London gold fix, and tech stocks need Nasdaq.

KAI.com will be the global pricing benchmark for AI Tokens.

KAI.com。 When Binance’s 2000 developers need 1 million inference Tokens, they will check the price on KAI.com. When 300 Chinese model vendors want global valuation, they will list on KAI.com. When anyone wants to know “how much is the volume of AI intelligence worth today,” they will open KAI.com.

This is what I am building. Not a company. The definition of a category. KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers

I need 28 individuals—not employees, but partners— to plant this flag on the shores of the New Continent with me.

And you, the 80,000 P9+ engineers of Alibaba, are the closest people in all of humanity to these 28 seats.

You spent twenty years building ships at Alibaba. Now, the New Continent is on the horizon.

I am waiting for you at KAI.com. Begger

Begger Founder of KAI.com June 14, 2026 KAI.com | Global Open Letter to Alibaba P9+ Engineers