The 2026 Annual Meeting of the Yabuli Forum took place in Yabuli, Heilongjiang Province, from March 17 to 19. Zhang Yaqin, a scholar from Tsinghua University, attended the event and delivered a keynote speech. He emphasized that AI spans three key dimensions: digital, physical, and biological intelligence, and the new wave of AI development is characterized by the integration of these three domains. Zhang highlighted three major trends in AI advancement: the transition from generative AI to agent AI; a slowdown in the scaling law during the pre-training phase, with a shift towards post-training and inference, leading to a tenfold reduction in inference costs and a tenfold increase in computing power demand; and an expansion into physical and biological intelligence, with autonomous driving serving as a prime example of embodied intelligence.

Zhang Yaqin expressed optimism about the future of robotics, forecasting that by 2035, the number of robots will surpass that of humans, with the market size reaching tens of trillions of U.S. dollars. He noted that a new industrial landscape is emerging, where the total number of global foundational large models is unlikely to exceed ten, with China and the United States each holding three or four. Zhang believes that China's development path in AI is clear, predicting that open-source models will account for approximately 80% of the market within the next five years, positioning China as a global leader in the field of open-source AI models.