Alibaba has revealed its first suite of AI models for robots, a move that says as much about where Chinese technology is heading as about the models themselves. The launch came as the industry pivots away from chatbots and towards agents, the systems meant to carry out complex tasks rather than just answer questions.
At the centre is RynnBrain, a system built to help machines understand space, objects, and motion, the perceptual groundwork a robot needs before it can act in the physical world. In a demonstration released by Alibaba’s DAMO Academy research arm, a robot identifies a piece of fruit and places it in a basket, a small task that stands in for a large ambition.
Alongside it, Alibaba announced Qwen3.7-Max, the latest in its proprietary large-language-model line, pitched as a foundation for AI agents.
The company said the model could run autonomously for up to 35 hours without performance degrading, a claim aimed at the durability that agentic work demands, since an agent that drifts after a few hours is of little use for tasks that take days. The figure is the company’s own.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!The framing Alibaba chose for itself is “AI factory.” It described itself as the only company in China operating all five layers of what it calls the full AI stack, from chips through an agentic cloud, models, model-serving platforms, and the applications on top.
