Ant Lingbo Embodied Large Model Challenge Concludes Preliminary Round: Record 1,855 Teams Registered, Real-Robot Final in Shanghai in November

On October 27, the online preliminary round of the first "Ant Lingbo Embodied Large Model Challenge," hosted by Ant Lingbo Technology, officially came to a close. Official data shows that the competition attracted a total of 1,855 teams and 3,252 contestants from home and abroad. Participants came from 13 countries, covering 648 well-known universities, research institutes, and leading technology companies and embodied intelligence companies, including 41 overseas universities and organizations, making the inaugural competition the largest in scale in the industry. It is reported that the offline finals will be held from November 14 to 16 in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, in the form of a 48-hour real-machine hackathon.

1,855 Teams: Tsinghua, Peking University, Overseas Prestigious Schools, and Frontline Industry Contestants Compete on the Same Stage

In September this year, Ant Lingbo Technology, together with ModelScope Community and Alibaba Cloud Tianchi, launched the first "Ant Lingbo Embodied Large Model Challenge" at the 2026 Bund Conference. This is an embodied intelligence algorithm challenge that uses the open-source model LingBot-VLA2.0 as its technical foundation, focusing on model training and tuning, simulation generalization evaluation, and real robot adaptation, and is open to enterprises, universities, individual developers, and technology enthusiasts worldwide.

At 0:00 on October 27, registration for the online preliminary round closed. A total of 1,855 teams registered for the competition, attracting students from prestigious universities such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, University of Science and Technology of China, Tongji University, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Harbin Institute of Technology, as well as the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Research forces from internationally renowned universities such as Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Southern California, University College London, Technical University of Munich, National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, University of Sydney, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Waseda University also participated.

Industry practitioners also used this competition as a technical "training ground." Developers from leading technology companies such as Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Meituan, Microsoft, BYD, and Xiaomi formed teams to compete one after another; domestic humanoid robot and embodied intelligence companies such as UBTECH, Fourier Intelligence, AgiBot, Zhuji Dynamics, and the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center also all entered the arena, making this challenge a real battlefield combining cutting-edge academic exploration and industrial engineering implementation.

According to the profile released by the competition organizing committee: among all participants, university students and researchers accounted for more than 70% (74.7%), of whom master's and doctoral students accounted for as high as 67.4%; at the same time, developers from enterprises and frontline practical fields accounted for 25.2%. High educational qualifications and strong practical experience became prominent labels of this year's contestants.

Half of the Contestants Have Hands-On VLA Experience, Accelerating the "Embodied Brain" Toward the Physical World

Judging from the technical map of the contestants, these developers are highly concentrated in the most core technical chain of embodied intelligence. Among them, contestants with backgrounds in VLA (vision-language-action) or multimodal large models accounted for as high as 51.7%; deep learning training accounted for 48%; reinforcement learning (31.9%), simulation environments (25.4%), model deployment (23.4%), real-machine debugging (20.9%), and robot control (20.1%) followed closely.

These data indicate that the Ant Lingbo Embodied Large Model Challenge not only attracted algorithm research talent, but also accumulated a large number of composite engineering developers with practical capabilities in "running on machines, real movement, and real tuning."

Industry analysts pointed out that the first Ant Lingbo Embodied Large Model Challenge was able to attract more than 1,800 high-level teams from around the world in a short period of time. On the one hand, it confirms that the embodied intelligence track is ushering in an unprecedented period of technological explosion, and developers are eager for knowledge; on the other hand, it also demonstrates the developer community's high recognition of Ant Lingbo's self-developed embodied large models.

As of now, Ant Lingbo's open-source models have accumulated more than 33,000 stars on GitHub, firmly ranking among the top domestic embodied models. Mainstream overseas technical communities have also achieved adaptation to Lingbo models. LingBot-VLA and LingBot-VA have both completed ecological adaptation to LeRobot, the world's largest robot development platform, and LingBot-Vision has been merged into the mainline of timm, the industry's mainstream visual backbone model library. LingBot-World has become the world's first world model to simultaneously receive support from the two major mainstream open-source inference engines vLLM and SGLang.

By opening up cutting-edge foundation model capabilities, real physical simulation, and engineering environments, Ant Lingbo not only provides a competitive stage for global developers, but also accelerates the process of the embodied intelligence "general brain" moving from theoretical algorithms to all-scenario industrial empowerment.

According to the schedule, the more challenging offline finals and the first Ant Lingbo Developer Conference will be held in Shanghai from November 14 to 16, with 15 teams competing in the form of a 48-hour real-machine hackathon. At that time, what innovative sparks the contestants will strike in the real world is worth looking forward to.