Alibaba’s Amap muscles up on ‘world models’ in push beyond text-based AI

Amap, the mapping and navigation arm of Alibaba Group Holding, is stepping up research into “world models” – systems designed to simulate real-world environments – as the tech giant pushes deeper into embedding artificial intelligence across its services.\nThe unit planned to launch a new product based on its FantasyWorld model, which was developed by the Alibaba Amap Computer Vision Lab and released in September, according to Shanghai Securities News. Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Alibaba owns the Post.\nFantasyWorld leads the WorldScore benchmark, an evaluation tool built by Fei-Fei Li’s team at Stanford University. Other top-ranked entries on the list include China Telecom’s TeleWorld and Tencent Holdings’ Voyager.\nAmap’s computer vision lab, which it describes as a key research body supporting a “spatial intelligent internet”, has been working across six key domains – including autonomous driving, 3D generation, world modelling, embodied intelligence, human-centric AI and general deep learning – according to information on its GitHub page.\n“Building world models has long been viewed as a key step towards artificial general intelligence (AGI),” the team said in the FantasyWorld research paper.\nAmap is also recruiting for those newer research areas, with job listings showing four openings related to world models and 13 tied to embodied intelligence.\n\nThe push mirrors a broader shift across the global tech landscape, where the biggest players are chasing AI systems that can reason about, and interact with, the physical world – not just generate text or images.\nGoogle in August announced its general-purpose world model Genie 3, following Meta Platforms’ V-JEPA 2 two months earlier. In China, Tencent and ByteDance have also been developing their own world-model efforts.\nLi has argued that “spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier”, a message she amplified in November after co-founding World Labs, a start-up that has raised at least US$230 million.\nAmap has been an increasingly prominent part of Alibaba’s AI push.\nIn December, it became the first major Alibaba service to fully integrate with the company’s AI app Qwen, allowing users to handle travel and lifestyle requests – from restaurant and hotel recommendations to route planning and turn-by-turn navigation – through a single conversational interface.\nIn September, Amap also rolled out “Street Stars”, an AI-driven ranking feature for offline destinations such as restaurants, hotels and tourist attractions, which it said would also help inform Qwen’s recommendations.\n