At a China-Arab digital economy matchmaking session on the sidelines of the fifth Global Digital Trade Expo, the Arab Digital Economy Alliance (AFDE) signed a framework memorandum of understanding with Ant Lingbo Technology, the embodied-AI company under Ant Group.
Dr Ayman Ghoneim, assistant secretary-general of the AFDE, and Yu Liang, head of commercialisation at Ant Lingbo, signed on behalf of the two sides. Under the memorandum the parties will build a regular cooperation mechanism to advance deployment and localisation of embodied-AI and robotics full-stack solutions across the UAE, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the wider Middle East, working together on scenario applications, data-model optimisation and regional industry-ecosystem building.
Around diversified scenarios the two sides set out five core cooperation directions: first, jointly promoting regional deployment and commercialisation of Ant Lingbo’s embodied-AI technology, models and robotics solutions in Middle East markets such as the UAE; second, joint proof-of-concept and industry applications across hotels, catering, retail, real estate, logistics, industrial operations, smart cities, healthcare and entertainment; third, localising solutions for Arabic interaction, regional operating environments, local workflows, cultural needs and customer demands; fourth, with permission, exploring real-scenario embodied-AI data and training collaboration in the Middle East; fifth, connecting government bodies, enterprises, research institutes, universities, investors and industry partners across China and the Middle East to accelerate ecosystem building.
Ant Lingbo is Ant Group’s embodied-AI company, building a robot’s native general ‘brain’ with a full stack from spatial intelligence and dexterous manipulation to dynamic-environment interaction. By September its open-source models had earned 31,800 stars on GitHub, among the top of China’s embodied-model field, showing strong global developer recognition. Ant Lingbo will soon release a cloud model toolchain platform. Its leading model performance and complete engineering toolchain were the key reasons the AFDE chose it.
On the commercialisation path, Ant Lingbo CEO Zhu Xing has said that generalisation ability is the core economic variable deciding the success of embodied-AI commercialisation. The company insists on training its embodied foundation model from scratch for the physical world, so the ‘general brain’ can seamlessly fit robots of different configurations and scenarios.
On this technical base, Ant Lingbo’s self-developed LingBot-VLA 2.0 base model already supports 17 brands and 20 robot configurations at the pretraining stage, the first ‘one brain, many machines’ engineering sample in the industry. The solution has already landed in real scenarios such as pharmacies, logistics and industrial loading and unloading. In a ‘robot smart pharmacy’ built with Shanghai Guoda Pharmacy, a robot running Ant Lingbo’s brain picks medicine accurately around the clock in an aisle only 80 centimetres wide, easing peak and night pressure.
The partnership at this Digital Trade Expo not only marks international recognition of China’s self-developed embodied ‘brain’, but opens a new paradigm for international embodied-AI cooperation, moving from ‘hardware cooperation’ to high-quality cooperation built on core technology models, engineering toolchains, localised scenario adaptation and deep industry-ecosystem integration, opening a new chapter for the global physical-world rollout of the ‘one brain, many machines’ vision.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Zhidx report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.zhidx.com/p/597786.html.