AGI Enters the Cognitive Landing Period - Global Technological Paradigm Reconstruction

January 2026 witnessed a critical leap in the global development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The industry has reached a consensus that AGI has officially entered the "cognitive landing period", with the technological focus shifting from "digital space perception" to "physical world cognition and planning", and accelerating evolution from "narrow domain specialization" to "full domain generalization". The relevant conclusions are derived from the "Global AGI Vision Report" released at the WAIC UP 2026 global annual conference, which integrates the practices of top scientific research institutions and technology giants from more than 70 countries.

In terms of core technological breakthroughs, the maturity of the "world model" has become a key symbol of AGI's cognitive upgrade. As AGI's "common sense brain", the world model has achieved a leap from "statistical correlation" to "causal reasoning", enabling AI to independently construct world cognition by simulating the laws of the physical environment in real time, solving the core pain point of lacking counterfactual reasoning. Benchmark achievements include Google's Genie 3 and Zhiyuan Wujie models, which can accurately reproduce dynamic physical scenarios; in drug research and development, they can predict the impact of molecular structure adjustments on side effects, improving the efficiency of candidate molecule screening by more than 50%.

Embodied intelligence has also achieved remarkable progress, moving from "software ghosts" to "industrial entities". The "brain (large model) + small brain (motion control)" architecture has become the industry standard, enabling robots to independently respond to environmental changes through visual-language-action collaboration and complete complex operations by "drawing inferences from one instance". At the same time, the cost of commercial humanoid robots has dropped significantly, from millions of yuan to around 500,000 yuan, and lightweight products are as low as tens of thousands of yuan, effectively meeting the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises. The standardized training system of "1:1 real scene reproduction + cloud simulation training" has also accelerated the landing of robots in industrial assembly, warehousing and logistics and other scenarios.

In terms of the global pattern, a "dual-track leadership by China and the United States, with parallel open-source and closed-source models" has initially formed. China leads the world in the open-source model ecosystem (such as Qwen and DeepSeek) and the industrialization of embodied intelligence, while the United States maintains advantages in GW-level computing infrastructure and closed-source large models. At the AAAI 2026 annual conference held in Singapore in January, Zhou Bowen, director of the Shanghai AI Laboratory, proposed the "Shanghai Plan" for AGI development, emphasizing the "integration of general and specialized capabilities", which triggered widespread international attention and provided a new path for global AGI development.