On February 3, the 2026 Zhiyuan Scholars Annual Conference was held in Zhongguancun, Beijing, with more than 100 experts, scholars, and industry leaders in the field of artificial intelligence gathering at the event. The Zhiyuan Research Institute announced the selection list of 2025 Zhiyuan Scholars and used this as a way to start the \"Zhiyuan Scholars 3.0\" stage, and at the same time, the 2026 Zhiyuan Scholars - Zhongzhi FlagOS direction solicitation was also released.
In 2019, the Institute launched the \"Zhiyuan Scholars Program\", which has gone through three stages: \"free exploration, task traction, and innovation leadership\", aiming to select and cultivate academic leaders with international influence, and form a collaborative innovation team for major research tasks and cutting-edge exploration. In the past six years, more than 150 scientists and young scholars have gathered, and a number of original innovative artificial intelligence enterprises have been nurtured. Huang Tiejun, chairman of the Zhiyuan Research Institute and professor of Peking University, said that the Zhiyuan Scholars Program has now entered the 3.0 innovation leading stage, which is a critical period for China's artificial intelligence to move from parallel to leading. Zhiyuan shoulders the responsibility of leading the development direction of future artificial intelligence technology, and will work with more outstanding scholars to build an innovation ecology in the artificial intelligence industry.
Entering the 3.0 stage, the \"Zhiyuan Scholar\" plan continues the tradition, focuses on cutting-edge innovation, and organizes scholars to carry out problem-oriented scientific research in the fields of crowd intelligence ecology, embodied intelligence and cutting-edge intersection; On the other hand, it provides stronger systematic support for scholars from scientific research resources, infrastructure, talent guarantee, research ecology to achievement transformation.
In this regard, Wang Zhongyuan, president of the Zhiyuan Research Institute, gave a detailed introduction to the 3.0 stage of Zhiyuan Scholars, and in September 2025, Zhiyuan will launch a new phase of the Zhiyuan Scholars Program and open it to the world for the first time. After a rigorous application and review process, 50 outstanding scholars from various fields were finally selected to form an international \"dream team\" focusing on the frontiers of artificial intelligence. A total of 50 research topics have been established in this batch, which have important academic exploration value and actual needs for industrial innovation, and are committed to promoting breakthroughs in the whole chain from basic research to technology application.
The Institute will also be a Zhiyuan scholarProvide a hierarchical and classified support system, including allocating special funds for strategic tasks, providing high-quality datasets and open source algorithm ecosystems, expanding multiple application scenarios for original achievements and promoting commercialization, and equipping exclusive engineering teams and professional-grade computing power equipment. In addition, the institute will actively promote the transformation of scientific research results into real productivity through a series of roadshows, industry docking and incubation acceleration.
The conference also held a ceremony to announce the list of candidates for the 2025 Zhiyuan Scholars Program and a letter of appointment ceremony, covering many key areas and important issues of scientific research breakthroughs such as basic software and hardware research and development, cross-innovation between life sciences and artificial intelligence, embodied intelligence, and quantum intelligence integration.
As a platform for the collision of cutting-edge academic ideas, the 2026 Zhiyuan Scholars Annual Conference conducted in-depth sharing and exchanges on the cutting-edge progress of artificial intelligence and key issues in scientific research promotion.
Shi Songhai, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, dean of the School of Life Sciences of Tsinghua University, and Zhiyuan scholar, delivered a keynote speech\"Common Evolution of Advanced Intelligent Brain Loops\"。 From the cutting-edge perspective of cross-innovation between brain science and artificial intelligence, he systematically explained the biological basis and evolutionary laws of advanced intelligence, providing important biological enlightenment and theoretical support for the research and development of a new generation of artificial intelligence systems.
Representatives of new Zhiyuan scholars also brought cutting-edge thinking in the field of artificial intelligence. Assistant Professor Zhang Wentao of Peking University, Associate Professor Luo Di of Tsinghua University, Associate Professor Chen Xiang of Peking University, and Assistant Professor Alexander Lamb of Tsinghua University respectively released breakthrough research results in three cutting-edge directions: basic model optimization, efficient deployment of embodied intelligence, and integration of quantum and AI. These reports comprehensively reflect the latest exploration of artificial intelligence at the level of theoretical innovation and technology implementation, and provide important thinking for promoting AI from the digital world to the physical world.
The first Zhiyuan Scholars Roundtable Dialogue focused on the construction of innovation ecosystem. With the theme of \"Leading the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Paradigm and Building a Scholar Innovation Ecology\", guests such as Qian Shanghang, tenured assistant professor of Peking University, Zhao Hao, assistant professor of the Institute of Intelligent Industry of Tsinghua University, Xu Qianqian, researcher of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhao Jie, professor of the School of Information Science and Engineering of Hunan University, and Han Peng, professor of the School of Software of Xi'an Jiaotong University, had in-depth discussions. They exchanged in-depth views on how to shape an open, collaborative and sustainable innovation soil, and formed a broad consensus on strengthening cross-institutional collaboration and stimulating the vitality of the community.
Focusing on the transformation of achievements, the second roundtable dialogue of Zhiyuan Scholars focused on \"From Laboratory to Industry: Decoding the Zhiyuan Model of AI Achievement Transformation\". Wang Zhongyuan, President of Zhiyuan Research Institute, Qiao Huijun, Partner of Hongtai Fund, Wang He, Founder and CTO of Galaxy GM, Liu Dong, Founder and CEO of Xingyuan Zhi, Zhang Yucheng, Senior Engineer of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Hu Di, Associate Professor of the School of Artificial Intelligence of Hillhouse, Renmin University of China, shared their respective practices, and Luo Xunyu, Vice Chairman of Entrepreneurship Dark Horse Group, served as the moderator of the roundtable. Everyone discussed the core challenges and feasible models in the process of paper to product, from algorithm to value transformation, and contributed their own solutions to explore systematic solutions in the \"last mile\" of technology implementation.
In his concluding speech at the forum, Huang Tiejun, chairman of the Zhiyuan Research Institute, emphasized that standing at the node of the new era, Zhiyuan scholars should not stop at the research and development of papers and systems, but should also take the initiative to open up new boundaries of intelligent technology and contribute to the progress of human intelligent civilization.
At the end of the conference, Zhiyuan released the \"2026 Zhiyuan Scholars Program - Zhongzhi FlagOS Direction\" solicitation, continuing to focus on open source and openness, gathering the innovation power of global scholars, and working together to build a unified, efficient and sustainable AI software and computing power infrastructure.
