Alibaba unveils RynnBrain, an embodied AI model that gives robots a ‘brain’
The model, which was unveiled by Alibaba’s Damo Academy, matched leading embodied models from Google and Nvidia
Alibaba Group Holding is stepping up its efforts in China’s heated race for embodied intelligence models, launching a new open-source model that gives robots a “brain”.
RynnBrain, an embodied foundation model based on Alibaba’s Qwen3-VL, marks the company’s latest efforts to deepen its footprint in the area of embodied intelligence – AI systems designed to perceive, reason and act in physical environments rather than purely digital settings. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
The model’s spatial reasoning capability sets it apart from its peers, marking a leap for Chinese developers in the field of embodied intelligence foundational models, said Charlie Zheng, chief economist at Samoyed Cloud Technology Group Holdings.
That represents a step forward in China’s efforts to solve a key obstacle for the development and commercialisation of robots, which is to make robots more powerful with “brains” instead of relying on preprogrammed routines.
According to Alibaba, RynnBrain moved beyond passive observation to more advanced capabilities of “performing physically aware reasoning and executing complex real-world tasks”.
It was able to identify and spatially map actionable possibilities within localised or three-dimensional contexts, enabling downstream Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to carry out more sophisticated tasks, the company added.