By Da Cheung
On June 16, Alibaba (9988.HK) (BABA) released the Qwen-Robot series, marking its first comprehensive foray into embodied AI — artificial intelligence designed to perceive and physically interact with the real world through robotic bodies. The release encompasses three distinct models: one for physical navigation, another for physical manipulation, and a “world model” that predicts physical dynamics to understand how the real world reacts to different actions.
The speed of the rollout is notable. The Chinese tech giant’s Qwen division only established its dedicated embodied AI team last October, moving from concept to a completed initial release in just over eight months. To demonstrate the system’s capabilities in the real world, researchers deployed the model on a robot dog manufactured by Unitree Robotics, a leading global robotics firm. Relying on a single, low-resolution camera, Alibaba’s model allowed the robot to navigate and complete tasks across an unfamiliar apartment based purely on verbal instructions, according to the robotics news outlet Robot Prospect.
The Qwen-Robot series aims to bridge the gap between large language models and physical action. Justin Lin, the technical lead of the Qwen team that spearheaded the embodied AI unit, stated last year that multimodal models should “definitely step from virtual world to physical world,” as reported by tech publication QbitAI.
The brain meets the body
Unitree, the company whose hardware served as Alibaba’s testbed, is one of the world’s most prominent developers of quadruped and bipedal robots. While it boasts formidable engineering capabilities, the company has historically shown a limited output in embodied AI model development.
This hardware-centric approach stems from a deliberate strategy. In the humanoid robot industry, a divide has emerged between “body-first” companies that prioritize physical movement and “brain-first” start-ups focused almost entirely on AI models. Unitree firmly belongs to the former. Its founder Wang Xingxing initially resisted building humanoid robots entirely due to a lack of practical use cases, only pivoting in early 2023 after the rapid rise of advanced language models like ChatGPT convinced him that robots might soon gain the ability to understand human intentions, according to the financial outlet Yicai.
Yet, the true test of the embodied AI era will not merely be who builds the most agile machine, but also be who can make that machine think.
A mutually beneficial match
Alibaba’s new models could compensate for Unitree’s current software limitations, amplifying its hardware dominance by providing it with a capable “brain.” In a July 2025 interview, Wang explained Unitree’s relatively restrained investment in AI by arguing that robotics AI was trailing general AI by about a decade. He felt it was too early to place massive bets.
“Once any company achieves a qualitative breakthrough in robot AI, we can directly produce 100,000 robots on the hardware side by the end of the year,” Wang told Yicai.
While the Qwen-Robot series could serve as the breakthrough Unitree has been waiting for, from Alibaba’s perspective the release is part of a much broader, capital-intensive artificial intelligence offensive. The company’s Qwen series already holds a significant position globally among open-source models, giving the tech behemoth a massive scale and capital advantage over other ‘traditional’ internet giants.
Over the past two years, Alibaba has poured funding into a slew of physical AI start-ups, including Unitree itself — it directly and indirectly holds about 0.67% of the robotics company’s shares. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu has predicted that global AI investment could surpass $4 trillion over the next five years.
Despite these aggressive moves, it remains to be seen whether Alibaba will ultimately secure a tier-one position in the overarching global AI hierarchy alongside frontrunners like Google. By leveraging its immense capital and technical scale, the Chinese giant is striking out across various AI sectors simultaneously. The launch of the Qwen-Robot series suggests this scattergun approach is yielding rapid technological progress, though it’s unclear in which specific industries Alibaba will ultimately establish a permanent foothold.
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