Meet the Chinese finance giant that's secretly an AI company

It shows how the company--which already operates a hugely successful smartphone payments business in China--aims to upend many areas of personal finance using machine learning and AI. The e-commerce giant Alibaba created Ant in 2014 to operate Alipay, a ubiquitous mobile payments service in China. It has become possible to automate this kind of image processing in recent years using a machine-learning technology known as deep learning. Once there, he developed Alibaba's first voice-recognition system for automating customer calls.