2026 Zhiyuan Conference to Explore Brain-Inspired Intelligence and Next-Generation AI

For seven years running, the Zhiyuan Conference has stood as one of artificial intelligence's most academically uncompromising gatherings. Organized by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), this annual event has drawn participation from 14 Turing Award winners over its history — a track record that cements its reputation as a true intellectual checkpoint for the global AI community. The 8th edition, taking place June 12–13, 2026, returns with a focused theme: brain-inspired intelligence and next-generation AI paths . It is not a conference for hype. Attendees and presenters alike describe it as "academically hardcore" — a place where rigorous science takes precedence over product launches and marketing narratives. This year's program brings together more than 200 leading experts and over 40 AI company CEOs and co-founders, spanning the full spectrum of artificial intelligence research. The agenda cuts across five core frontier areas: Agent — autonomous systems capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex tasks World Model — building internal representations that let AI understand and simulate reality Embodied AI — intelligence that interacts with the physical world through robotics and sensors AI Self-Evolution — systems that improve their own capabilities through continuous learning AI Safety — alignment, robustness, and the governance of increasingly capable models Each of these tracks reflects a deliberate shift away from scaling alone. While large language models have dominated headlines in recent years, the Zhiyuan Conference has consistently pushed the conversation toward architectures that draw inspiration from biological intelligence — neural circuits, cognitive architectures, and learning mechanisms that go beyond next-token prediction. BAAI, the organizing body behind the conference, has positioned itself as a leading force in open-source AI research and open science. The Zhiyuan Conference serves as its flagship forum for surfacing ideas that are still too early, too ambitious, or too foundational for mainstream industry conferences. It is where researchers share raw results, debate architectural directions, and test the limits of current paradigms. For AI insiders, the conference functions as an annual barometer — a place to measure how far the field has come and, more importantly, to sense where it is heading next. The 2026 edition promises to be no exception. As the community grapples with questions of safety, scalability, and the nature of intelligence itself, the conversations in Beijing this June will likely echo through the rest of the decade.