BAAI
nonprofitThe Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), also known as the Zhiyuan Institute, was established in November 2018 as China's first private non-enterprise unit (民办非企业单位) focused on AI research. While supported by the Beijing Municipal Government and the Haidian District, its non-profit legal structure allows it to function as a collaborative "hub" bridging academia and industry. Its founding members include Baidu, ByteDance, Xiaomi, Meituan, and Megvii.
BAAI is a primary beneficiary of Beijing's strategic investment in AI, with an estimated annual budget of 3–5 billion yuan ($420–$700 million). It has access to municipal and national funds (including the $8.2 billion National AI Industry Investment Fund) and recently launched a major initiative to build a 100,000-chip domestic computing cluster. This project, powered by FlagOS 2.0, provides a unified heterogeneous computing pool of 5–8 EFLOPS for the Beijing innovation hub.
The academy supports approximately 300 top researchers through its Zhiyuan Scholars Plan and operates the Jiuding AI-computing platform. BAAI made global headlines in 2021 with the Wu Dao 2.0 program (1.75T parameters, the world's largest model at the time), but the model was significantly undertrained relative to its size — 10x GPT-3's parameters on a fraction of the data. Following the 2022 "Chinchilla" scaling laws, BAAI deliberately pivoted away from the trillion-parameter arms race. Wu Dao 3.0 (July 2023) introduced the Aquila series (7B–70B) instead of a 2T successor, prioritizing deployability: as a nonprofit research academy, BAAI's mission is to provide foundations the broader Chinese AI ecosystem can actually run on standard hardware, not models requiring massive GPU clusters few can afford.
BAAI redirected its research energy into high-impact specialized directions: BGE embeddings (among the most downloaded models on HuggingFace globally), Emu3 (unified multimodal next-token prediction, published in Nature 2025), FlagEval benchmarks, the FlagOpen open-source ecosystem, and the RoboBrain embodied AI series. Under Wang Zhongyuan (President since February 2024, formerly VP of Tech at Kuaishou), BAAI announced the WuJie (悟界) series in June 2025 — a pivot toward "physical AGI" comprising Emu3 (multimodal world model), Brainμ (neuroscience), RoboBrain 2.0 (embodied), and OpenComplex2 (life sciences). BAAI was added to the U.S. Commerce Entity List in March 2025.
BAAI is one of three pillars of Beijing's Haidian District AI ecosystem, alongside the newer Zhongguancun Academy (ZGCA) and Zhongguancun Institute of AI (ZGCI) (both founded 2024 by ex-Microsoft Research AI4Science leadership). BAAI is headquartered at Zhiyuan Mansion (智源大厦) on Chengfu Road in Wudaokou, ~15 km southeast of ZGCA/ZGCI's Haidian Dayue IT Park campus. The three institutions operate as complementary, not formally linked entities: BAAI provides foundational infrastructure (BGE, FlagOS, Aquila), ZGCA cultivates AI talent and AI-for-Science research, and ZGCI focuses on industrial applications (drug discovery, embodied AI). BAAI separately maintains an AI 0-1 Original Innovation Fund with Zhongguancun Development Group (ZGC Group, the Beijing state-owned holding company — a different entity from ZGCA). All three regularly present at the annual Zhongguancun Forum.
Your notes
People
- Zhang Hongjiang (张宏江) Google ScholarWikipedia — Founder & Chairman (formerly Microsoft Research Asia (co-founder, Asst Managing Director); Kingsoft (CEO 2011-2016); Microsoft Distinguished Scientist (2010))
- Wang Zhongyuan (王仲远) Google Scholar — President / Director (since Feb 2024) (formerly Kuaishou (VP of Tech, 2020-2024); Meituan (Sr Director, Search & NLP); Facebook (Research Scientist); Microsoft Research Asia; PhD Renmin University)
- Huang Tiejun OpenReview — Board Chairman (former Director, 2018-2024) (formerly Professor, Peking University)
- Xinlong Wang OpenReview — Core Researcher (Emu series)
- Shitao Xiao OpenReview — BGE Lead