Alibaba’s Amap muscles up on ‘world models’ in push beyond text-based AI
Alibaba’s mapping arm Amap is pushing into ‘world models’ with FantasyWorld, betting spatial AI can power navigation and new services
Amap, the mapping and navigation arm of Alibaba Group Holding, is stepping up research into “world models” – systems designed to simulate real-world environments – as the tech giant pushes deeper into embedding artificial intelligence across its services.
The unit planned to launch a new product based on its FantasyWorld model, which was developed by the Alibaba Amap Computer Vision Lab and released in September, according to Shanghai Securities News. Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Alibaba owns the Post.
FantasyWorld leads the WorldScore benchmark, an evaluation tool built by Fei-Fei Li’s team at Stanford University. Other top-ranked entries on the list include China Telecom’s TeleWorld and Tencent Holdings’ Voyager.
Amap’s computer vision lab, which it describes as a key research body supporting a “spatial intelligent internet”, has been working across six key domains – including autonomous driving, 3D generation, world modelling, embodied intelligence, human-centric AI and general deep learning – according to information on its GitHub page.
“Building world models has long been viewed as a key step towards artificial general intelligence (AGI),” the team said in the FantasyWorld research paper.
Amap is also recruiting for those newer research areas, with job listings showing four openings related to world models and 13 tied to embodied intelligence.