Alibaba, Tencent lead pivot from chatbots to embodied AI for robotics

Chinese tech companies are racing to deploy Artificial Intelligence models into robots, shifting the battleground for Generative AI from digital chatbots to physical autonomous systems.Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen3.7-Max model, launched last week, features “tool-calling” capabilities that allow the AI model to act as a digital brain to trigger external software and hardware components. The company said the model could be used to control robots by orchestrating physical actions like navigation, obstacle avoidance and task planning.The tech giant has also released a suite of supporting AI models for Robotics, including a robotic gripper agent, a navigation model and a vision-language system designed for physical-world interaction. Alibaba owns the China-morning-post" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="12558" data-entity-type="organization">South China Morning Post.