Alibaba establishes a robotics and embodied intelligence team to explore bringing AI from the virtual world to the physical world
Alibaba is forming a robotics and embodied intelligence team to explore transforming Tongyi Qianwen from a language model into an agent capable of acting in the real world. The team will utilize multimodal foundational models for long-range reasoning, advancing AI from the virtual to the physical world. Additionally, Alibaba has led a $140 million financing round for the robotics technology company "Zivariable Robotics" to accelerate the research and commercialization of AI and robotics technology. In the next five years, Alibaba plans to invest 380 billion yuan in cloud and AI hardware infrastructure and expects global AI investment to grow to $4 trillion
According to the Zhitong Finance APP, on October 8th, Lin Junyang, the head of Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen large language model, posted on social media X that a small team focused on robotics and embodied intelligence has been formed. He stated that multimodal foundational models are transforming into foundational agents, which can utilize tools and memory to perform long-horizon reasoning through reinforcement learning. "They absolutely should move from the virtual world to the physical world." This means that Alibaba is exploring the transition of Tongyi Qianwen from a purely language model to an agent capable of "acting" in the real world.
It is understood that Alibaba (09988) is continuously increasing its investment in hard technology and the AI industry. On September 8th, Alibaba Group announced that it led a $140 million financing round for the robotics technology company "Variable Robots." This round of financing will be used to accelerate its core technology research and development, product iteration, and commercialization of artificial intelligence and robotics globally. In addition to capital injection, Alibaba is also expected to engage in deep collaboration with Variable Robots in areas such as cloud computing, AI platforms, supply chains, and global channels, helping to rapidly scale its technological products. In the future, the two parties may first implement cooperative projects in scenarios such as intelligent manufacturing, warehousing logistics, and home service robots.
Additionally, at the previous 2025 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu also stated that global AI investment is expected to accelerate to $4 trillion over the next five years, and Alibaba must keep pace. In addition to the previously announced investment of 380 billion yuan in cloud and AI hardware infrastructure over the next three years, Alibaba plans to make additional investments
