Alibaba Cloud aims to "inject soul" into countless hardware

Author | Zhou Zhiyu

Editor | Zhang Xiaoling

In the past two years, when we talked about AI, we mostly discussed the cursor on the screen and the text continuously generated in the dialogue box. It is powerful, but it always feels a bit distant from life.

Various tech companies are also trying different smart hardware, but only a few people can experience it first.

Alibaba Cloud attempted to break through this barrier. On January 8, Alibaba Cloud released a multimodal interaction development kit, which essentially conveyed one thing: AI applications have finally taken on a tangible form.

It aims to make AI no longer an ethereal cloud brain, but to give soul to the glasses on users' noses and the teddy bears in children's arms.

Xu Dong, General Manager of Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi large model business, pointed out that the combination of large models and hardware will bring new traffic.

This is no longer a superficial story about how well cloud services are selling, but a strategic game about the migration of entry points. In Xu Dong's view, although mobile phones occupy a large amount of our time, they are more about "one-way input"; the upcoming explosion of AI hardware is trying to take over people's memories and lives in a more fragmented and sticky way.

The "multimodal interaction development kit" released by Alibaba Cloud is precisely to provide gold diggers with the most suitable shovel in this new land.

What is the concretization of AI landing? First and foremost, it is speed.

In the virtual world, you can tolerate ChatGPT thinking for three seconds; but in the physical world, if you ask the glasses "What is in front?", an answer three seconds later is meaningless. Interactions in the physical world must be instantaneous.

The core breakthrough of the kit released by Alibaba Cloud this time lies in reducing the response speed of the "cloud brain" to the physical limit. End-to-end voice interaction latency is as low as 1 second, and video interaction latency is as low as 1.5 seconds.

What does this mean? It means that machine feedback has finally caught up with human speech speed. For example, the AI glasses developed in collaboration with Thunderbird Innovation and Alibaba Cloud achieve an average of 1.3 seconds for simultaneous interpretation and multimodal interaction. When "understanding" and "feedback" occur almost simultaneously, AI is no longer a tool that needs to be deliberately invoked, but becomes an instinctive response of the hardware itself.

This change is a transition from the flat world of "Chatbot" (chatbots) to the "three-dimensional" world of hardware interaction. This extreme low latency is the physical foundation for AI to move from "tasting" to "landing."

This will be an important step for AI to accelerate its entry into people's lives.

In the past, cloud vendors focused on how much money they could make from each Token (computing power unit). This led hardware manufacturers to be hesitant to use it, as it was unaffordable. A piece of hardware costing hundreds of dollars could have a monthly cloud service fee that is even more expensive than the hardware itself.

To truly enable AI to land, Alibaba Cloud has directly broken through the threshold this time. It has changed the billing model from the uncontrollable Token to a more hardware sales logic-friendly "per device License" billing or low-cost package.

Alibaba Cloud not only provides models but also pre-installs more than a dozen Agents (intelligent agents) and MCP tools, allowing hardware manufacturers to develop devices with complex capabilities through simple drag-and-drop This is also Alibaba Cloud's bet on the future: when thousands of physical devices are equipped with Tongyi's "soul," the data, stickiness, and entry value generated by these devices will far exceed the revenue from selling that bit of computing power.

Another tangible manifestation of AI landing is the establishment of integrated hardware and software standards.

At the exhibition, Alibaba Cloud showcased its deep integration with the RISC-V architecture (Xuantie chips). Alibaba Group Vice President Qi Xiaoning likened it to: the CPU is the body, and AI is the soul.

This is a very clear signal: in the fragmented physical world (IoT), Alibaba Cloud is attempting to establish a new Wintel alliance with the combination of "Tongyi large model + RISC-V chips."

In the future, the Tongyi large model will also achieve collaborative optimization of the entire software and hardware chain with Xuantie RISC-V, realizing extremely efficient deployment and inference performance of the Tongyi large model family on the RISC-V architecture.

This is of great significance for developers in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen. They do not need to understand complex algorithms or adapt chips themselves; they only need to hold Alibaba Cloud's "key" to unlock the door to AI hardware. This has directly spawned the birth of a large number of "new species."

According to Xu Dong, 2026 will be a year of explosion for these new hardware. For example, the Hearing Bear is not a cold, lifeless tape recorder, but a growth partner that can understand children's unique expressions and resonate emotionally. It can chat for over an hour without awkward pauses, a level of high stickiness in interaction that mobile apps cannot achieve.

Another example is AI glasses, which free up hands and understand the world through cameras. When users see a ball rolling out by the roadside, it can infer that there might be a child behind it; this understanding of causal relationships is the most fascinating aspect of physical AI.

Xu Dong even mentioned niche hardware like "Flash Capsule," which, although seemingly unremarkable, solves significant problems in specific scenarios (such as recording for mothers or meeting minutes).

As AI becomes tangible, what we see is no longer a uniform smartphone but various "new species."

Everything Alibaba Cloud is doing today—making the billing model more user-friendly, lowering the development threshold to drag-and-drop, and fitting models into domestic chips—is all about building momentum for the moment when that new species explodes.

It is also attempting to seek the next source of traffic in the physical world and fragmented scenarios.

As Xu Dong said, internet traffic has peaked, but traffic in the physical world has just begun.

Since the release of the development kit, Alibaba Cloud aims to give all hardware manufacturers a ticket to enter the new era. This may not be the most profitable business, but it is definitely the right path—because only when AI truly lands in the physical world can the long-anticipated intelligent era truly begin