Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Tencent are transitioning their generative AI efforts from chatbots to robotics. This strategic shift aims to deploy AI models into physical autonomous systems for enhanced capabilities.

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,....