On September 19, Alibaba and the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) held a signing ceremony in Hefei to formalize a donation of AI services. This marks the inaugural stop of the "Wise Across a Thousand Miles" initiative, Alibaba's public welfare program designed to support higher education institutions across the country.

The program, jointly launched by Alibaba Cloud and the Alibaba Foundation, aims to donate AI services to empower university faculty and students in their teaching, research, and development of AI agents. The initiative is expected to expand to additional universities in the future. Under the donation agreement, Alibaba will provide USTC with computational resources powered by two of its AI products — Qianwen Office and Qoder — for eligible faculty and students to use free of charge. The university will manage the allocation of these resources, which are intended for campus activities of a public welfare nature, such as teaching, practical work, and scientific research.

"Universities are at the forefront of AI exploration and represent one of the most important scenarios for combining public welfare with AI," said Sun Lijun, Chairman of the Alibaba Foundation, at the signing ceremony. He explained that the goal of the initiative is to better stimulate the creativity of university faculty and students, compile representative application cases, and explore new models for scientific research organization. Qianwen Office is Alibaba's enterprise-grade general-purpose agent product, while Qoder is a coding-focused intelligent agent platform designed for all users under the Alibaba umbrella.

During the event, appointment ceremonies were held for campus ambassadors of both Qianwen Office and Qoder. These ambassadors will play a key role in supporting their peers as part of the "Wise Across a Thousand Miles" plan. Additionally, Alibaba announced the launch of the "Thousand-Mile Exploration Award" to encourage faculty and students to share their experiences and creative works using AI tools.

At the event, Professor Zhang Yongyan, Executive Dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at USTC, engaged in a discussion with a campus ambassador for Qianwen Office. She praised the student's work developed using the product, noting that AI tools like Qianwen Office should play a positive role in university education and research. She expressed hope that students would quickly make use of the donated computing services from Alibaba.