At the 8th Beijing Intelligence Conference 2026 held today, Wang Jian, director of Zhejiang Laboratory and founder of Alibaba Cloud, pointed out when talking about the impact of AI on scientific research that the impact of artificial intelligence on scientific research has undergone qualitative changes, and its impact on science is very long-term.
In Wang Jian's view, from the earliest large language models that could only understand text content, to now they can begin to understand multi-modal data and code. The core behind these changes is that AI can understand different types of data.
"Today AI has changed the way programmers work. Artificial intelligence has taken a big step forward. In a sense, it can really distinguish what is language text and what is code text." Wang Jian said bluntly, "All scientific data will be re-understood because of the emergence of artificial intelligence. You can imagine how big the changes will be at this time."
"Just like when AI understands code, the first person to be affected is the programmer himself. I think when AI understands scientific research, the logic of how scientific researchers will be affected is also the same." Wang Jian said bluntly.
