GoKawiilA mechanical hand is on display at the Robot Mall, world's first embodied intelligent robot 4S store, on August 13, 2025 in Beijing, China.
BEIJING — Alibaba Cloud is investing in a new type of artificial intelligence designed to better replicate the real world using a different approach from chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.
The shift recognizes the limits of "large language models" trained primarily on text. Instead, developers are starting to focus more on "world models" built on videos and real-life physical scenarios.
To jump on the trend, Alibaba led a 2 billion yuan ($290 million) investment in ShengShu, the startup behind the AI video generation tool Vidu, the company announced Friday. TAL Education and Baidu Ventures also participated in the series B funding round.
The investment comes about two months after ShengShu raised 600 million yuan from Qiming Venture Partners and other backers. The startup declined to disclose its valuation.
ShengShu said the latest funding will support the development of a "general world model" that uses AI to bridge two currently separate domains: the digital world of games and AI-generated video, and the physical world of autonomous driving and robots.
"ShengShu believes that a general world model, built on multimodal data such as vision, audio, and touch, more naturally captures how the physical world works than large language models," the three-year-old startup said in a statement.