Alibaba Builds Robot AI Team as SoftBank Acquires ABB's Robotics Unit for $5...

TMTPOST -- Alibaba Group Holdings Lts. is jumping on the robotic bandwagon as the world’s leading tech companies are racing to add artificial intelligence (AI) to their arsenal to transfer their cutting-edge technologies to the physical products.

Credit：Alibaba Cloud

In his X post on Wednesday, Junyang Lin, a technology head at Alibaba’s Qwen, said he has built a team for robotics and embodied AI inside the team of Alibaba’s flagship large language model (LLM) and multimodal model series. Lin is responsible for building Qwen and the opensource of the models, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Lin is his post suggested the new robotic team is working on accelerate physical AI and robotics. “Multimodal foundation models are now being transformed to foundation agents that can leverage tools and memory to perform long-horizon reasoning thanks to reinforcement learning. they should definitely step from virtual world to physical world!” he wrote.

Lin didn’t provide details about the new team. Alibaba last month demonstrated their ambitious AI bets, including its first foray into robotics.

Chinese humanoid startup X Square Robot on September 8 announced it secured around $100 million in funding led by Alibaba. That is the company’s eighth funding round since it was founded in December 2023, and the latest deal brings total investment in it to about $280 million, Chief Operating Officer Yang Qian told CNBC.

Alibaba would increase spending on AI and cloud infrastructure beyond the RMB380 billion ($53 billion) it had committed in February, to be deployed over the next three years, said the CEO Eddie Wu at the annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou on September 24. Alibaba’s spending plan resulted from the AI frenzy trend. Wu said the global spending on AI computing capacity is likely to reach $4 trillion within five years, with consolidation leaving only “five or six” super cloud computing platforms worldwide.

Coincidentally, SoftBank Group Corp., one of Alibaba’s earliest investor and a major shareholder in more than two decades, on Wednesday said it signed an agreement with ABB Ltd., to acquire the Switzerland engineering group’s robotics business for $5.375 billion.

SoftBank in its statement said the takeover deal had been approved by its board of directors and pending for approvals from regulators in the European Union, China and the United States. It expected the deal to conclude in mid-to-late 2026.

“SoftBank’s next frontier is Physical AI. Together with ABB Robotics, we will unite world-class technology and talent under our shared vision to fuse Artificial Super Intelligence and robotics — driving a groundbreaking evolution that will propel humanity forward,” said SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son in the statement.

“ABB and SoftBank share the same perspective that the world is entering a new era of AI-based robotics and believe that the division and SoftBank’s robotics offering can best shape this era together,” said ABB CEO Morten Wierod. “ABB Robotics will benefit from the combination of its leading technology and deep industry expertise with SoftBank’s state-of-the-art capabilities in AI, robotics and next-generation computing. This will allow the business to strengthen and expand its position as a technology leader in its field.”

Son in June last year first laid out his vision for a world fearing his dubbed Artificial Super Intelligence, or ASI. While the artificial general intelligence (AGI) is likely to be one to ten times smarter than humans and will be here in the next three to five years, with ASI, “you will see a big improvement,” said Son. Various ASI models that interact with each other in a human brain will lead to AI that is 10,000 times smarter than any human genius, he said.