October 9, 2025 – On October 8, Lin Junyang, the head of Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen large – language model, made a post on the social media platform X. He announced that a small – scale team focusing on robotics and embodied intelligence has been established.
Lin pointed out that multi – modal foundation models are evolving into basic intelligent agents. These agents are capable of leveraging tools and memory to conduct long – horizon reasoning through reinforcement learning. He firmly believes that “they definitely deserve to make the leap from the virtual realm to the physical world.”
In the context of global tech giants’ active forays into the robotics sector, Alibaba Cloud has recently made its first move in the field of embodied intelligence. Last month, it took the lead in investing $140 million in the Chinese robotics start – up X Square Robot.
Moreover, Alibaba’s CEO Wu Yongming has stated that over the next five years, the total global AI investment is expected to surge to $4 trillion. He emphasized that Alibaba must keep pace with this rapid growth trend.
It’s worth noting that as the technical leader of Tongyi Qianwen, Lin Junyang has previously been involved in the development of a multi – modal model that can handle audio, image, and text inputs.
