Alibaba’s Qwen lab sets up robotics team, showcasing its AI ambitions
The announcement suggests the Chinese tech giant is accelerating its development in the field of AI-powered hardware
“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.
“They should definitely step from [the] virtual world to [the] physical world!”
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Humanoid robots show impressive moves at world conference in Beijing
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.