On the morning of June 6, the BAAI Conference 2025 opened at the Exhibition Center of Zhongguancun National Independent Innovation Demonstration Zone. Yin Yong, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee and Mayor of Beijing, attended and addressed the opening ceremony.
Yin Yong said that artificial intelligence (AI) is a key technology driving the new round of sci-tech revolution and industrial transformation, with the potential to profoundly reshape how people live and work. As China’s most resource-rich city for AI innovation, Beijing has in recent years leveraged its strengths in science, education, and talent to accelerate AI innovation and technological progress, deepen cross-sectoral integration, and foster a vibrant innovation ecosystem. According to Yin, Beijing will continue to place equal emphasis on innovation and application, accelerating its efforts to become a major contributor to AI innovation and an industrial hub of global significance. The city will continue to attract top-tier talent, implement stronger and longer-term support policies, and promote integration between industry and education to cultivate young and interdisciplinary professionals. To enhance technological innovation, Beijing will explore new pathways such as AI-enabled scientific research and accelerate the development of disruptive technologies. It will also strengthen vertical applications by launching benchmark projects that bring AI into a wide range of industries. In addition, greater efforts will be made to promote open innovation. This includes encouraging enterprises to develop open-source model architectures and building open-source, general-purpose datasets, thereby establishing Beijing as a global center for open-source sharing. Friends worldwide are welcome to Beijing to innovate, start businesses, and jointly explore new development opportunities in the AI sector.
Yoshua Bengio, 2018 A.M. Turing Award Laureate, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Professor at the University of Montreal; and Richard Sutton, 2024 A.M. Turing Award Laureate, Chief Scientific Advisor at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and Professor at the University of Alberta, delivered keynote speeches. This year’s conference features a plenary session, thematic forums, and a series of special events, centered around four key themes: basic theories, application exploration, industrial innovation, and sustainable development of AI. It aims to foster in-depth discussions on cutting-edge AI topics and future trends, and to promote global innovation and advancement in AI technology.
Zeng Jin, Secretary General of the People’s Government of Beijing Municipality, also attended the event.