This year’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference, or WAIC, appears to be even more lively than last year, mainly due to higher participation standards, reflecting China’s emphasis on artificial intelligence. But in reality, in such a short time, there hasn’t been much of a major technical breakthrough either. Everyone is still steadily advancing.

The industry as a whole is iterating step by step, with the focus shifting from a race over large model parameters toward AI agents, domestic computing power clusters, and practical deployment of humanoid robots. More of it is about engineering and industrialization implementation, not a revolutionary breakthrough in underlying principles.

The main highlights should include: Huawei Ascend 950 super node completing the gap in domestic computing power; Sugon’s one hundred thousand-card homegrown super-cluster; AI agents from Baidu, ByteDance, and Jumpspace Star (階跃星辰) starting to do autonomous work; and robots such as Ziyuan entering factories for hands-on production.