Alibaba Cloud's Wang Jian: Our understanding of AI from a scientific perspective is still limited to the knowledge created by humans.

On July 17th, at the 2026 WAIC event, Wang Jian, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, director of the Westlake Laboratory, and founder of Aliyun, stated that, up to now, our understanding of artificial intelligence still remains at a very superficial level; when scientific data truly becomes the basic element of large models, a scientific revolution comparable to the Galileo era is just beginning. At the event, Wang Jian traced back the brief history of artificial intelligence development: many people today talk about large models, subconsciously equating them to large language models, but few remember the term "basic model" until it was truly created in 2021. And text processing is actually the first threshold that artificial intelligence can easily cross.