Lin Junyang, head of Alibaba’s Qwen large language model, said on X that he has set up a small team for robotics and embodied AI within Qwen. He wrote that multimodal foundation models are now evolving into foundation agents capable of using tools and memory to perform long-horizon reasoning through reinforcement learning, adding that “they should definitely step from the virtual world to the physical world.”
The announcement highlights Alibaba’s growing focus on embodied AI. Last month, Alibaba Cloud led a US$140 million funding round for Chinese robotics startup X Square Robot. At the 2025 Yunqi Cloud Summit, CEO Wu Yongming said global AI investment is expected to accelerate to US$4 trillion over the next five years, noting that Alibaba must keep pace with that trend. [IThome, in Chinese]
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