WAIC Highlights Part Two: Turing Laureates, Startups Showcase AI Innovation(Yicai) July 17 -- The second part of Yicai's series on the top highlights from the World Artificial Intelligence Conference focuses on the event's growing role as an international platform for academic exchange and innovation, from Turing Award-winning researchers to emerging startups and next-generation AI products.
Highlight 6: Nine Turing Award and Nobel Prize winners gather at WAIC
This year's conference has brought together more than 1,400 guests from China and abroad, who will share the latest academic achievements in AI across more than 140 forum events. Among them are winners of the Turing Award, the highest honor in AI, and the Nobel Prize, including nine laureates in total.
At today's main forum, Richard Sutton, the 2024 Turing Award winner known as the "Father of Reinforcement Learning," delivered a keynote speech. Yoshua Bengio, winner of the 2018 Turing Award, introduced the United Nations framework for AI governance. Gilles Brassard, winner of the 2025 Turing Award, Omar M. Yaghi, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and other scholars also discussed the emerging paradigm of AI for Science (AI4S), which combines AI and high-performance computing to speed up scientific research.
Highlight 7: Innovation Incubation Zone searches for the next unicorn
WAIC Future Tech, located at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center, serves as the conference's innovation incubation zone. This year, organizers selected around 150 startups and 22 one-person company projects from 1,200 innovation projects, covering industry applications, embodied AI and terminals, infrastructure, and frontier technologies.
For example, Xingjie Zhiwei, founded last month, showcased a "streaming video generation" technology that combines the reasoning capabilities of large language models, video generation, and AI agents, allowing videos to be generated in real time through continuous conversational interaction. FieldQuantum Technology, established in January, demonstrated its AI4S agent built on quantum computing technology.
These startups will host roadshows, open mic sessions, and innovation-sharing events during WAIC to attract investors and industry participants.
Highlight 8: StepFun releases the world's first agent-native operating system
Shanghai-based Jieyue Xingchen Intelligent Technology, also known as StepFun, showcased its agentic smartphone StepX Neo at WAIC, equipped with the world's first agent-native operating system, Step AOS.
Rather than adding AI functions to existing touch-based operating systems, Step AOS is designed from the ground up to support AI agents, exploring a new path for next-generation human-computer interaction.
Highlight 9: Alibaba's T-Head showcases Panjiu AL128 supernode
T-Head Semiconductor, the chip design arm of Alibaba Group Holding, showcased the Panjiu AL128 supernode AI server at WAIC. The system is built on the company's self-developed Zhenwu M890 AI chip and ICN Switch 1.0 interconnect chip, marking the product's first public appearance.
T-Head Vice President Gao Hui will speak at a forum tomorrow, focusing on how cloud service providers in the AI era can shift from serving human engineers to serving AI agents, and how AI can be deployed more efficiently at scale across enterprises.
Highlight 10: Two forums focus on green computing power
As demand for AI computing power continues to grow, reducing the energy consumption of large computing centers has become critical to the industry's sustainable development. Two WAIC forums, "Refactoring Computing Power" and "AI and Green Low-Carbon Development," will discuss the issue.
At the forums, Huawei Technologies, Dawning Information Industry, and MetaX Integrated Circuits will showcase computing clusters using next-generation liquid-cooling technology, while State Grid Corporation of China will present case studies of green electricity supporting computing centers.
Read Part One: WAIC Highlights Part One: Local AI Chipmakers Take Center Stage as Tech Giants Debut New Products covers five other highlights from the conference, including domestic AI chips, computing infrastructure, AI agents, embodied intelligence, and consumer AI products.
Editors: Dou Shicong, Emmi Laine
