Alibaba's robot AI debut signals China's bid to own the physical world

Alibaba Group Holding has released its first batch of artificial intelligence models built for robots, stepping into a worldwide effort to move AI past chat windows and into machines that operate in the real world.

The Hangzhou tech firm unveiled the Qwen Robot Suite on Tuesday, its newest move into “embodied AI,” which refers to machines that can take in their surroundings, think through problems, and act on them.

The company said the tools, created by its research group Tongyi Lab, are already being trialed by a handful of chosen Alibaba Cloud business customers.

The suite is divided into three layers that link together. Qwen-RobotNav helps machines make sense of physical spaces and move around in them.

Qwen-RobotWorld serves as a video “world model” that lets robots predict how a scene will play out before they act. Qwen-RobotManip handles the hands-on work and runs on the Qwen3.5-4B architecture.

Qualcomm bets on a world run by AI agents

The launch lands as chipmaker Qualcomm prepares for a flood of AI “agents” across everyday gadgets.

Chief Executive Cristiano Amon told the company is working on more than 40 designs for new AI devices, hinting at big changes ahead for smartphone leaders like Apple and Samsung.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,” Amon said on CNBC’s “The Tech Download” podcast.

“Right now, we have over 40 designs of those devices, and I’m telling you, the types of form factors are very, very broad.” He said the products include jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches. The point, he explained, is to have something you wear all the time that can see the world around you and connect you to an agent.

Agents are viewed as the next step beyond helpers like Apple’s Siri or Google Gemini. Companies expect them to handle longer, harder jobs across apps, such as booking a holiday. Cryptopolitan has previously reported research and expert analysis which showed AI agents have not yet completely delivered what was promised and rather have invited more crises inside the organizations.

Amon described an agent that pulls up banking details on its own, without the user hunting through an app. Apps are “not dead,” he said, “but apps are going to change.” He added, “Those agents are going to be the new app.”

Amon thinks this could shift power away from the smartphone. “The phone is around the agent. The new classes of devices … are going to be around the agent as well,” he said, while noting phones won’t disappear.

He is hopeful about smart glasses, saying shipments now sit in the “order of multiple tens of millions” each year and could hit “hundreds of millions” within a couple of years. By contrast, 1.26 billion smartphones shipped in 2025, about 3% more than the year before, according to Counterpoint research. Meta and Samsung are both building glasses with cameras.

Amon said these shifts could let new kinds of firms enter the hardware market. Last year OpenAI bought io, the startup founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive. “All the devices that we wear become endpoints for agents,” Amon said, adding that companies also want the data these gadgets collect, which he called “exponentially larger” than what is used to train today’s models.

Why Western firms are turning to cheaper Chinese AI

While US firms chase new hardware, Chinese AI is spreading fast on price. Ask DeepSeek about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, it fails to reply based on the information it has. Since 2024, Xi Jinping’s government has oversight on AI makers to avoid touchy subjects like Taiwan and human rights.

So what makes Chinese models preference for abroad? OpenRouter data showed Chinese systems were the five most popular AIs last week, including DeepSeek, Tencent’s Hy3, and MiniMax. A year ago, all five were American.

The reason is Anthropic’s Fable 5 cost $10 (£7.40) per million tokens before its weekend suspension; DeepSeek’s top model costs 14 cents. Running costs have jumped 41% since January, according to Silicon Data. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky uses Alibaba’s Qwen because it is “fast and cheap,” and Coinbase boss Brian Armstrong predicts 80% of company AI work will run on the cheapest models within 18 months.

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