Alibaba Group Holding has established a robotics artificial intelligence team at its Qwen laboratory, marking its entry into the AI-powered hardware industry as tech giants accelerate their development in the field, according to a researcher from the lab.
“In case you don’t know, I set up a small team for robotics and embodied AI inside Qwen,” Lin Junyang, a tech leader at Qwen, said in a social media post on Wednesday, sparking speculation about Alibaba’s strategic initiatives in creating “brains” for robots.
“Multimodal foundation models are now being transformed to foundation agents that can leverage tools and memory to perform long-horizon reasoning thanks to reinforcement learning,” Lin said.
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“They should definitely step from [the] virtual world to [the] physical world!”
Alibaba’s Qwen series is among the world’s most popular open-source AI models. Seven Qwen models recently made the top 10 rankings on Hugging Face, the world’s largest open-source community, with the multimodal large model Qwen3-Omni taking the top spot.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Group chairman Joe Tsai said at an event hosted by the US podcast All-In last month that the winner in AI should not be defined as “who comes up with the strongest AI model”, but on “who can adopt it faster”.
He noted that China’s approach to developing cost-effective open-source AI models was “conducive to faster adoption” compared with the US strategy of pouring tens of billions of dollars into developing trillion-parameter models.
“I’m not saying China technologically is winning the model war, but in terms of the actual application and also people benefiting from AI, it has made a lot of development,” Tsai said.
Last month, CEO Eddie Wu Yongming said Alibaba planned to increase capital spending on AI infrastructure over the next three years from the originally pledged 380 billion yuan (US$53 billion) to become “the world’s leading full-stack AI service provider”, ranging from computing power to models.
The Hangzhou-based company has also made several investment deals within China’s booming robotics and embodied intelligence sector, including in Unitree Robotics, a leading manufacturer based in the same city in eastern Zhejiang province.