On the morning of January 5, Sina Tech reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Amap (高德), the mapping and local services platform under Alibaba Group (阿里巴巴集团), has begun developing a world model and plans to launch a new product application based on the technology.
According to the report, the model has achieved top rankings across multiple metrics in the spatial intelligence benchmark WorldScore. WorldScore was proposed by a team led by Fei-Fei Li (李飞飞), a renowned Chinese-American artificial intelligence scientist and professor at Stanford University, and is the first open-source benchmark designed to provide unified evaluation for multimodal world-generation models.
The report also said that Amap (高德) has established an embodied intelligence division internally. Job listings on recruitment platforms show that the division is hiring for multiple roles, including embodied intelligence product specialists as well as data and algorithm engineers. People familiar with the matter said that product forms such as robots and robotic dogs are among the areas being explored by the new division.
In August 2025, Amap announced a comprehensive shift toward AI, fully pivoting to spatial intelligence. In September of the same year, it launched a local services product known as Amap Street Sweeping Ranking (高德扫街榜). More recently, Alibaba Group’s flagship AI application “Qwen” (千问) made its first integration with an Alibaba ecosystem scenario through Amap and Amap Street Exploration Rankings.