JD Cloud is signaling its commitment to 'physical AI'—artificial intelligence capable of perceiving, acting, and operating in the real world. This concept was presented to the public through an advertising campaign in airports and the launch of unmanned coffee shops ahead of the company's annual technology conference.
The campaign slogan, stating 'bringing AI into the physical world,' is displayed in airports across the country. Concurrently, JD Cloud collaborated with 7FRESH to sell 'super-token size' coffee in a fully automated store where the ordering, preparation, and receipt of the drink occur without human intervention, demonstrating the transition of AI from the digital sphere to reality.
Both these steps point toward the upcoming JD conference, known as JDD, scheduled for September 9th. This year's conference theme is 'JoyAI: Leaping into the Physical World.' This course aligns with a broader industry trend, as companies like NVIDIA, Tesla, and Anthropic are also viewing physical AI as the next frontier for artificial intelligence.
JD's approach consists of three main components. Firstly, JD acts as a major buyer and platform for robots. JD Logistics has committed to purchasing three million robots, one million autonomous vehicles, and 100,000 drones over five years. These devices will be used for warehousing, sorting, transportation, and delivery. The company also advertised 'buy robots on JD' at this year's World Robotics Conference. Plans include establishing 80 RoboBase service centers covering over 100 countries, alongside a recycling program that allows logistics workers to be retrained as robot maintenance and repair engineers.
Secondly, JD Cloud is developing a conveyor of embodied data. This conveyor transforms warehouse, supermarket, delivery, and cleaning activities into training data via a crowdsourcing-based data collection terminal and a data infrastructure covering collection, labeling, training, and simulation. However, industry observers note that sending people to manage robots solely for data collection may not be the most cost-effective method.
Thirdly, the JoyInside brand is integrating AI into residential spaces before the advent of universal robots. Intelligence is integrated into humanoid robots, quadruped robots, learning devices, lighting fixtures, and mattresses. It is expected that around 200 brand partners and tens of millions of terminals will be involved this year.
JD asserts that it will become clearer whether these elements form a complete physical AI system at the JDD conference on September 9th.