When discussing AI over the past two years, the focus has mostly been on the cursor on our screens or the text continuously generated in dialog boxes. It's powerful, yet often feels somewhat detached from our daily lives. Technology companies have been experimenting with various smart hardware, but only a select few have had the chance to experience these innovations firsthand. Alibaba Cloud is attempting to pierce through this barrier. On January 8th, it released a multimodal interaction development kit, essentially conveying one core message: the application of AI is finally taking a tangible form. It aims to transform AI from an abstract, cloud-based brain into something that gives "soul" to the glasses on a user's nose or the teddy bear in a child's arms. Xu Dong, General Manager of Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi large language model business, pointed out that the integration of large models with hardware will generate new traffic flows. This is no longer a superficial story about cloud service sales performance; it is a strategic game concerning the migration of user entry points. In Xu Dong's view, while mobile phones consume a significant portion of our time, they primarily represent "one-way input." In contrast, the impending wave of AI hardware is attempting to take over our memories and lives in a more fragmented, yet stickier, manner. The "Multimodal Interaction Development Kit" released by Alibaba Cloud is precisely intended to hand the most suitable shovel to the prospectors on this new frontier. What does the tangible implementation of AI look like? First and foremost, it's about speed. In the virtual world, one might tolerate ChatGPT taking three seconds to think; but in the physical world, if you ask your glasses "what's ahead?", a response three seconds later is meaningless. Interaction in the physical world must be instantaneous. The most crucial breakthrough of the kit Alibaba Cloud released lies in pushing the reaction speed of the "cloud brain" to its physical limit. End-to-end voice interaction latency is reduced to as low as one second, and video interaction latency to 1.5 seconds. What does this mean? It means machine feedback has finally caught up with the pace of human speech. For instance, the AI glasses developed in collaboration between RayNeo and Alibaba Cloud achieve an average simultaneous interpretation and multimodal interaction response time of 1.3 seconds. When "understanding" and "responding" occur almost simultaneously, AI ceases to be a tool that requires deliberate activation and instead becomes an instinctive capability of the hardware itself. This shift moves from the flat world of "Chatbots" into the three-dimensional world of hardware interaction. This extreme low latency is the very physical foundation enabling AI to transition from a "novelty" to a "practical application." This represents a significant step towards AI accelerating its integration into people's lives. Previously, cloud providers focused their business on profit per Token (a unit of computing power). This led to hardware manufacturers being hesitant to adopt the technology due to cost concerns. The monthly cloud service fee for a piece of hardware costing a few hundred yuan could potentially exceed the cost of the hardware itself. To enable genuine AI implementation, Alibaba Cloud has now shattered this barrier. It changed the billing model from the unpredictable Token-based system to a "per-device License" fee or low-cost packages, which align better with the sales logic of hardware. Alibaba Cloud not only provides the model but has also pre-installed over ten different Agents and MCP tools, allowing hardware manufacturers to develop devices with complex capabilities through simple drag-and-drop operations. This is also Alibaba Cloud's bet on the future: when thousands of physical devices are infused with the "soul" of Tongyi, the data generated, user stickiness, and entry-point value of these devices will far surpass the revenue from selling mere computing power. Another manifestation of tangible AI implementation is the establishment of integrated hardware-software standards. At the exhibition, Alibaba Cloud demonstrated its deep integration with the RISC-V architecture (Xuantie chips). Qi Xiaoning, Vice President of Alibaba Group, likened it to: the CPU is the body, and AI is the soul. This sends a very clear signal: in the fragmented physical world of IoT, Alibaba Cloud is attempting to establish a new "Wintel-like" alliance using the combination of the "Tongyi large model + RISC-V chips." In the future, the Tongyi model family and Xuantie RISC-V will achieve collaborative optimization across the entire hardware-software chain, enabling highly efficient deployment and superior inference performance for the Tongyi model family on the RISC-V architecture. This is highly significant for developers, such as those in Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei. They don't need to understand complex algorithms or handle chip adaptation themselves; they simply need to use Alibaba Cloud's "key" to unlock the door to AI hardware. This directly facilitates the birth of a multitude of "new species." In Xu Dong's view, 2026 will be the year these new hardware devices explode onto the scene. For example, the "Hearing Bear" is not just a cold, repetitive recorder, but an empathetic growth partner that understands children's unique ways of expression. It can chat for over an hour without the conversation stalling—a level of highly sticky interaction that mobile apps cannot achieve. Another example is AI glasses, which free up the user's hands and use cameras to "see" the world. If a user sees a ball rolling into the street, the glasses can infer that a child might follow—this understanding of causality is one of the most fascinating aspects of physical AI. Xu Dong even mentioned niche hardware like "Flash Thought Capsules." While they may seem insignificant, they solve major problems in specific scenarios, such as helping new mothers keep records or assisting with meeting minutes. As AI implementation becomes tangible, what we see is no longer a uniform array of smartphones, but a diverse ecosystem of unique "new species." Everything Alibaba Cloud is doing today—making the billing model more affordable, lowering the development barrier to drag-and-drop, and embedding models into domestic chips—is building momentum for that moment when these new species explode in popularity. It is also attempting to venture into the physical world, into fragmented scenarios, to discover the next wellspring of traffic. As Xu Dong stated, internet traffic may have peaked, but traffic in the physical world is just beginning. Starting with the release of this development kit, Alibaba Cloud wants to provide all hardware manufacturers with a ticket into this new era. This might not be the most profitable business in the short term, but it is arguably the right path—because only when AI truly lands in the physical world will the long-envisioned era of intelligence truly begin.
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