Ant Group has conducted a significant restructuring of its artificial intelligence division, altering its overall AI strategy. As part of these changes, the general model Lingguang has moved away from direct market competition, while the healthcare-focused assistant A-Fu has been designated as the group's main strategic priority.
Lingguang's product lead, Han Luo, has been transferred to support A-Fu, and key members of the Lingguang team are being directed to accelerate A-Fu's development. This reorganization reflects current market conditions.
According to QuestMobile data, rankings for native AI applications in May 2026 showed that ByteDance Doubao leads with 382 million monthly active users (MAU). It is followed by Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen with 167 million MAU, as well as DeepSeek and Tencent Yuanbao. Ant Group's A-Fu ranks fourth with 28.97 million MAU, while Lingguang failed to enter the top 10.
Although A-Fu is a leader in the vertical AI category for healthcare, its audience reach is still significantly smaller than that of general AI leaders. A-Fu, personally named by Jack Ma, is defined as Ant Group's strategic anchor for AI. The product integrates AI-based health management directly into insurance products, offering services such as health Q&A, medical report interpretation, AI appointment scheduling, health insurance payment, and medicine purchasing, all closely linked to the Alipay health channel.
Ant Group aims to transform low-frequency financial products into high-frequency health engagement through A-Fu, thereby creating an AI hub for health and insurance. Concurrently, Lingguang is reorienting towards research activities, recently updating its world experience by integrating Ant Lingbo's latest world model, LingBot-World 2.0. This positions Lingguang as an experimental platform for cutting-edge AI technologies, while A-Fu carries the mandate for commercialization and user growth.
A-Fu faces pressure from multiple sides. ByteDance has invested over 20 billion yuan in healthcare infrastructure, boasting over 20 portfolio companies, and launched the Xiaohie AI Doctor application. Furthermore, Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen serves as a powerful general-purpose alternative capable of absorbing healthcare use cases. A-Fu must demonstrate the ability to exceed 30 million MAU and prove that vertical AI can create a sustainable business model sufficient to justify its strategic position within the broader Alibaba ecosystem, otherwise, it risks following Lingguang's path—gradual integration into the general platform.
LimX Dynamics has demonstrated how the full-sized humanoid robot Oli is capable of independently performing prolonged household chores in a real living space without requiring remote control or editing.
The robot, featuring 31 degrees of freedom, continuously performed a series of household duties in one uninterrupted cycle, including folding clothes, organizing items, stacking boxes, collecting trash, and delivering water. This achieved level of long-term autonomous manipulation places LimX second in the world, alongside the company Figure.
The breakthrough is attributed to LimX's COSA 0.5 brain architecture, which consciously rejects the commonly accepted industry model for brain function. Founder Zhang Wei asserts that equating a large model with brain functions is erroneous. He compares a pure large model to Stephen Hawking lying in bed: extremely intelligent but completely incapable of movement. In Zhang Wei's view, the brain is a system that organizes cognitive abilities, skills, and motor control into a single architecture operating on a real physical body.
The COSA system implements a three-stage architecture, S2-S1-S0, functioning across different time scales. The S2 Cognitive level acts like the prefrontal cortex, utilizing an LLM/VLM agent for scene understanding, memory, world modeling, reasoning, and human interaction. This level determines which actions need to be performed. The S1 Skills level provides a set of trained capabilities, including Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for generating full-body motion. At the S0 Motion Control level, it works with a 10-million-parameter Whole Body Trajectory (WBT) policy at a frequency of 1000 Hz directly on the device, translating arbitrary target movements from higher levels into balanced, coordinated joint commands.
These layers interact through intentionally narrow interfaces: intent is passed down, and the robot's state is passed up asynchronously, without blocking operation. This architecture allows for stable iteration, something approaches based on a single model cannot achieve. Each layer can be updated, replaced, or fine-tuned independently without affecting the others. In the Oli demonstration, reinforcement learning was used on the real robot, where experts remotely corrected errors, while S0 maintained balance autonomously. Collected data was used to train reward models, and RL continued to iterate on the real robot, making the system stronger with each use, rather than stopping after initial training.
The home demonstration also confirmed LimX's strategic focus on out-of-factory applications. While most embodied AI companies focus on industrial deployment, LimX CEO Zhang Wei is orienting humanoids toward commercial service, hospitality, entertainment, and domestic care markets, where value is created through physical interaction similar to human interaction. The possibility opened up by COSA 0.5 makes this strategy increasingly plausible, demonstrating that a system designed for consumer applications can achieve world-class performance in autonomous manipulation.
A new law in China prohibits artificial intelligence platforms from providing virtual romantic partners. This measure is aimed at preventing emotional dependence and protecting the mental health of the population.
This decision has caused significant resonance, and on social media, users who maintained long-term relationships with such companions have begun sharing stories of grieving.
This case demonstrates how deeply technology has already penetrated the intimate and emotional spheres of people's lives.
