(Bloomberg) — Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. has established an in-house team for robotics, joining major global firms in a race to build AI-powered physical products.
The Chinese e-commerce firm has created a “small team for robotics and embodied AI,” Alibaba executive Justin Lin said in a post on X on Wednesday.
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The team is housed within Qwen, the unit that is responsible for the eponymous flagship AI foundational model the Hangzhou-based company offers, according to Lin. The executive currently serves as technology lead at Qwen and helped develop multimodal models that can process sounds and images in addition to text input.
Multimodal models are being turned into foundation agents that can perform long-horizon reasoning tasks, Lin said, and these applications “should definitely step from virtual world to physical world!”
Alibaba Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu in late September said he anticipates overall AI investment accelerating to some $4 trillion worldwide over the next five years. The company last month also led a $140 million funding round in Chinese robotics startup X Square Robot.
The Hangzhou company is pouring resources into smart robotics as leading global tech firms from Nvidia Corp. to SoftBank Group Corp. see this as a major growth driver. SoftBank on Wednesday announced a $5.4 billion deal to acquire ABB Ltd.’s industrial robot business. And Nvidia boss Jensen Huang has said that his company has a “multitrillion-dollar” long-term growth opportunity with AI and robotics.
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