WAIC Wrap-Up: Beyond the Robots, What Does AI Really Rewrite?

The WAIC 2026 closing roundtable, hosted by InfoQ, brought together four experts: Lian Wenzhao (professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and founder of Yuanluo Tech), Guo Quanwei (chief scientist at Yusheng Science), Gong Sansan (co-founder of Diffusion Intelligence and HKU PhD student), and Du Yu (director of the Unknowable AI Research Institute and former investment VP at Sequoia Capital China). They discussed what AI is truly rewriting, noting that it accelerates speed and potentially expands boundaries, but cautioning that it may not yet surpass human creativity. They debated the authenticity of AI demand: while big tech AI businesses like Kuaishou Keling, ByteDance Jimeng, and Unitree see revenue growth, some AI products may be pseudo-needs that don't solve real problems. For embodied intelligence, Lian emphasized that real value lies in long-sequence, high-precision tasks like laboratory automation, while Du Yu drew parallels to mobile internet waves, seeing embodied intelligence as a new device layer. On model paradigms, Guo argued that the Scaling Law era may be ending, advocating for model ecosystems and hybrid approaches combining autoregressive and diffusion models, while Gong noted advantages of diffusion language models for local deployment. The group also discussed investment trends, noting that capital is increasingly flowing toward world models, robotics, and physical AI, with Du Yu advising scientists to communicate simply for funding. Overall, the panel stressed that beyond the noise, AI must deliver tangible, reliable value in real-world scenarios.