Alibaba Cloud Founder Wang Jian: AI Will Become Basic Scientific Tool, Multimodal Data Integration Key to Next Competition

At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Alibaba Cloud founder and Chinese Academy of Engineering academician Wang Jian stated that AI is entering a critical turning point. He argued that scientific data will redefine the nature of AI, emphasizing that science-based foundation models should integrate text, code, and scientific data into a unified model space through tokenization, rather than relying solely on research papers and code.

Wang predicted that over the next 50 years, AI's role in science will parallel mathematics' contribution over the past centuries. He noted that the next phase of AI competition will center on the integration capability of multimodal scientific data.