Saadet Gokce
February 11, 2026•Update: February 12, 2026
ISTANBUL
Chinese tech firm Alibaba launched a new open-source model that gives robots a "brain," the South China Morning Post said Wednesday.
RynnBrain, an embodied foundation model based on Alibaba’s Qwen3-VL, was designed to perceive, reason and act in physical environments rather than purely digital settings.
Alibaba said it can perform more advanced capabilities, including "performing physically aware reasoning and executing complex real-world tasks," instead of just passive observation.
It is capable of identifying and spatially mapping actionable possibilities within localized or three-dimensional contexts, which in turn enables downstream Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to carry out more sophisticated tasks, it added.
The distinctive spatial reasoning capability marks a leap for Chinese developers in embodied intelligence foundational models, according to Charlie Zheng, chief economist at Samoyed Cloud Technology Group Holdings.
It marks progress in China’s efforts to overcome a major challenge in robot development and commercialization, which is making robots more advanced with "brains" rather than relying on preprogrammed routines.
Additionally, Chinese AI large language model (LLM) DeepSeek confirmed Wednesday that it expanded its context window from 128,000 tokens to more than 1 million to improve AI systems’ handling of human queries.
With a larger context window, an AI model can "remember" and process more information in a single conversation or task, enabling it to perform more complex reasoning as well as work better with data and code.
South Korea unveils $692M project to create AI semiconductors for on-device use
Separately, South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy unveiled a 1 trillion-won ($692.6 million) project Wednesday set to begin next month to develop AI semiconductors for on-device use, according to the Yonhap News Agency.
The government and private sector-backed initiative aims to develop 10 AI chips in the next five years for use in self-driving cars, smart home appliances, humanoid robots and other applications.
The project is expected to help local firms reduce their technological dependence on foreign AI chipmakers, said the ministry.
