China’s Alibaba releases AI search tool for small businesses in Europe and the Americas

Published

1 year ago

November 12, 2024

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Alibaba International promotes its e-commerce platform for small businesses at the Canton Fair in Guangdong, China, on Oct. 16, 2024.

Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images

BEIJING — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on Tuesday unveiled an artificial intelligence-powered search engine for small businesses in Europe and the Americas to source supplies.

It’s an attempt to leverage ChatGPT-like tech to increase sales. Initial tests showed businesses’ purchase intent using the new tool increased by 40% versus traditional search engines, according to Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com and vice president of Alibaba International.

The product is called Accio, after the spell used in the Harry Potter fantasy series for summoning objects. The initial version is web-based and supports English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish, according to the company.

With a few text or image prompts, businesses can use Accio to find wholesale products — including analysis on their popularity with consumers and projected profit, according to demos viewed by CNBC.

Examples shown included helping a sports entrepreneur to build a line of pickleball products. At the end of the search, the tool lists a number of procurement options for the business to discuss directly with each supplier.

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The tech uses generative AI from Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen large language model, Zhang said, declining to confirm whether the product integrates AI from other companies.

An LLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on large amounts of data. A model supports generative AI applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which generates human-like responses to user prompts. To be sure, several businesses are still in the experimentation phase with AI and many firms are yet to find a way of monetizing the technology.

Accio uses data from 50 million businesses on Alibaba International’s platform, and publicly available industry information, Zhang said. He said the tool incorporates 1 billion product listings and documents covering industries across more than 100 markets from Alibaba.com, the company’s business-to-business platform which sells to companies outside China.

Businesses based in Europe and North America are the largest group of buyers, the company said.

Alibaba’s international arm in October announced an updated version of an AI translation tool to help merchants reach customers in other countries. The company claimed the tech’s translation capabilities beat that of Google, DeepL and ChatGPT.

The international business has grown rapidly in recent years, but Alibaba’s main revenue driver remains its domestic e-commerce platforms Taobao and Tmall. In August 2023, management told investors that “the Taobao app has the greatest potential to become a one stop smart portal for life and consumption enabled by AI.”

During the weeks-long Singles Day shopping festival that wrapped up Monday, more than half of over 500 merchants selling on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com used a generative AI-enabled tool, according to a survey by Bain & Company.

Those features include AI for customer service and generating content. The survey found 56% of respondents said AI tools had “high positive impact” on improving productivity.

Alibaba is scheduled to report quarterly results on Friday.

—CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.

Technology

Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup’s robots could ‘fracture a human skull’

Published

3 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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$Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull'$

Startup Figure AI is developing general-purpose humanoid robots.

Figure AI

Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup’s former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company’s robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.”

Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer, is the plaintiff in the suit filed Friday in a federal court in the Northern District of California. Gruendel’s attorneys describe their client as a whistleblower who was fired in September, days after lodging his “most direct and documented safety complaints.”

The suit lands two months after Figure was valued at $39 billion in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital. That’s a 15-fold increase in valuation from early 2024, when the company raised a round from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

In the complaint, Gruendel’s lawyers say the plaintiff warned Figure CEO Brett Adcock and Kyle Edelberg, chief engineer, about the robot’s lethal capabilities, and said one “had already carved a ¼-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction.”

The complaint also says Gruendel warned company leaders not to “downgrade” a “safety road map” that he had been asked to present to two prospective investors who ended up funding the company.

Gruendel worried that a “product safety plan which contributed to their decision to invest” had been “gutted” the same month Figure closed the investment round, a move that “could be interpreted as fraudulent,” the suit says.

The plaintiff’s concerns were “treated as obstacles, not obligations,” and the company cited a “vague ‘change in business direction’ as the pretext” for his termination, according to the suit.

Gruendel is seeking economic, compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial.

Figure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did attorneys for Gruendel.

The humanoid robot market remains nascent today, with companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics pursuing futuristic offerings, alongside Figure, while China’s Unitree Robotics is preparing for an IPO. Morgan Stanley said in a report in May that adoption is “likely to accelerate in the 2030s” and could top $5 trillion by 2050.

Read the filing here: