Alibaba leads $290 million investment for building a new kind of AI model as LLM limits emerge

Alibaba is investing $290 million in ShengShu, a startup developing world models (AI systems trained on videos and physical scenarios rather than just text) to better understand and replicate the real world. This shift reflects growing recognition that large language models (LLMs, which are AI trained mainly on text data) have limitations, and companies are now focusing on AI that can work with robots and other systems that need to understand physical reality.