Alibaba forms robot and embodied intelligence team

On October 8th, Lin Junyang, the head of Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen big language model, announced on social media X that a small team of robots and embodied intelligence has been formed. He mentioned that multimodal basic models are transforming into basic agents that can use tools and memory to perform long-range reasoning through reinforcement learning, and should move from the virtual world to the physical world. As global tech giants are expanding their presence in the robotics industry, Alibaba Cloud recently made its first foray into embodied intelligence, leading a $140 million funding round for Chinese robotics startup independent variable robot last month. At the 2025 Yunqi Conference two weeks ago, Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming stated that the total global AI investment will accelerate to $4 trillion in the next five years, and Alibaba must keep pace. In addition to announcing in February that Alibaba will invest 380 billion yuan in cloud and AI hardware infrastructure over the next three years, it also plans to increase investment.