The Sequence AI of the Week #883: Qwen is Getting Into Robotics
One of the main frontier AI models is adding embodied AI capabilities. Alibaba's Qwen-Robot Suite aims to bridge the gap between perception and action with three specialized models.
For about three years now, the Qwen family has lived inside a rectangle. It reads your code, looks at your screenshots, answers your questions, and the whole time it has been doing this behind glass. It can describe a coffee cup in exquisite detail. It cannot pick one up.
That gap — the one between a model that understands the physical world and a model that can move something in it — is the single most honest sentence in Alibaba’s June launch of the Qwen-Robot Suite. The Tongyi Lab team put it plainly: seeing is not acting. The perception and reasoning are already strong. The bottleneck for embodied intelligence is the translation layer between “I see what needs to happen” and “here are the joint torques to make it happen.” Three new models — Qwen-RobotNav, Qwen-RobotManip, and Qwen-RobotWorld — are Alibaba’s bet on closing that gap, and they are interesting less for any single benchmark number than for the shape of the bet.
Let me explain why I think this is the right shape, and where I’d keep my skepticism.
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