2026 Physics AI and World Model Conference Opens in Nanjing: Three Turing Award Winners Speak, 50 Application Scenarios Unveiled

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Seventy years ago, in a conference room at Dartmouth College, the concept of "artificial intelligence" was first put to paper, opening a long exploration of machines simulating human thought; seventy years later, today, the question of the AI era has long advanced from "can machines compute" to "can machines understand the world."

When algorithms step out of the virtual data space, how to make machines truly see, perceive, and integrate into the real physical world has become a threshold the entire industry must cross.

On October 20, the 2026 Physical AI and World Models Conference, themed "Modeling the Physical World · Enlightening a Better Future," officially opened in Nanjing.

The conference was jointly hosted by Jiangsu Data Group, Nanjing Big Data Group, and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. In the venue linking online and offline in sync, explorers from different generations and different tracks gathered together, colliding ideas and anchoring direction under the same future proposition.

Artificial intelligence is reaching a crossroads of paradigm shift—this was the consensus of the entire conference.

Dai Qionghai, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, cut straight to the core: Physical AI lets AI master objective rules such as mechanics and temporal changes; world models integrate physical laws, spatial relationships, and behavioral logic into a dynamic system capable of causal reasoning, driving AI to upgrade from recognizing the world to understanding the world, predicting the world, reasoning about the world, and transforming the world.

Tan Tieniu, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, pointed out in one phrase the foundation of world models: modeling the physical world is a technical challenge and even more a proposition of the era; enlightening a better future requires global wisdom and even more requires open exchange.

On the conference's keynote stage, a chain of inquiry spanning half a century was threaded together.

Yang Likun, executive chairman of AMI Labs, Yao Qizhi, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and John Hopcroft, foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences—three Turing Award laureates—each brought deep thinking spanning the globe via video.

The on-site sharing likewise delved layer by layer along this chain of questions.

Shen Xiangyang, foreign academician of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and chairman of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Council, proposed: dexterous hands are humanity's last dignity, the Everest of embodied intelligence's technical complexity, and the hardest reproduction on machines of humanity's core capability to transform the world.

Yu Haibin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the Institute of Industrial Artificial Intelligence of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, focused on intelligent manufacturing: world models are AI's worldview, reflecting AI's cognition of the operating laws of the physical world. With world models, AI can rehearse in its mind to make better decisions.

Entrepreneurs on the industry front lines brought vivid practices of technology implementation.

Chen Boyuan, founder and chief R&D officer of Inverse Matrix Technology and head of the Behavioral World Model Innovation Center at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, believes: physical AI must let machines truly possess the ability to draw inferences in unknown real-world environments; the mission of physical intelligence must ultimately be to return human value to humanity.

Cao Xudong, CEO of Momenta, proposed: world models are accelerating Moore's Law for intelligent driving, and he predicts that 2028 will become an important inflection point for large-scale L4 deployment.

Gao Haichuan, founder and CEO of Qianjue Technology, focused on the general robot brain of embodied intelligence: implementation in the physical world has requirements for fault tolerance and reliability far higher than those of the digital world.

The value of this conference lies not only in the collision and clash of ideas, but even more in letting industry consensus take root step by step, moving from concept to practice.

At the data foundation level, the National Data Annotation Pilot Su-Wan City Alliance (Yangtze River Delta Data Annotation Joint Innovation Center) was officially established at the opening ceremony.

Ten cities—Nanjing, Wuxi, Suzhou, Huai'an, Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, Suqian, Wuhu, Ma'anshan, and Chuzhou—joined hands, marking that the data annotation industry has entered a new stage of integrated development from "one city piloting first" to "ten cities linked together."

Jiangsu simultaneously released the "Physical AI and World Models High-Quality Dataset Action Plan," concentratedly launched nine typical innovation achievements of "Physical AI and World Models," and released 50 typical application scenarios of "Physical AI and World Models" for 2026, covering five major fields—industrial development, social governance, scientific research, livelihood services, and consumption upgrading—providing a clear path for technology implementation.

The construction of the standards system also took a key step forward in sync. The National Information Standards Technical Committee approved the establishment of the Embodied Intelligence Standards Working Group; Zhu Xiumei, party secretary and vice president of the China Electronics Standardization Institute, read out the establishment announcement on site; the pre-research work for the national standard "Artificial Intelligence World Models" was officially launched, laying a solid institutional foundation for the standardized development of the industry.

Industry and capital also connected quickly on site. The first national "Physical AI and World Models Investment Fund" strategic cooperation was signed, with a total fund size of 5 billion yuan, focusing on frontier technologies of world models and concentrating on directions such as medical artificial intelligence, industrial world models, and autonomous driving.

It is worth mentioning that the event site also linked the professional journal "Physical AI and World Models" and the AI youth community: the journal openly solicits academic papers, technical cases, and industrial innovation achievements from society at large, welcoming experts and scholars, industry practitioners, and university teachers and students to submit enthusiastically; the youth community provides a one-stop entry for reading news, submitting resumes, and interactive exchange—here, you can be both an observer of new technologies and a creator of them.

May every young seed carrying an innovation dream find its own direction of growth in this open soil.

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