Haier-led AI appliance pilot base launches in Qingdao; BAAI holds first roadshow

The base will build five capabilities: product pilot testing, scenario pilot testing, industrial pilot testing, scaled promotion, and standards and safety. On the consumer side, it is to promote smarter products and cross-brand, cross-device interconnection; on the industrial side, it is to bring AI into R&D, manufacturing, supply chains, marketing and services. The base is to act as a connector for industry chain coordination, an accelerator for technology transfer, and an incubator for applications, according to Leiphone.

At the ceremony, the base appointed experts from the China Household Electrical Appliances Association, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, iFlytek and other units, and signed agreements with its first batch of ecosystem partners, including Huawei Technologies, China Mobile Communications Group and Alibaba Cloud Computing. It also launched an 'AI+consumption' collaborative development matrix and opened recruitment to the wider society. The base has set up a supply-demand operations platform and an application service market, aiming to collect real enterprise needs, organize joint research through mechanisms such as open calls for challenges, and promote mature solutions that have passed pilot testing. As the base's builder, Haier Smart Home will rely on its industrial practices and scenario resources to work with industry parties and open capabilities to companies of different sizes and types.

In a separate event reported by Leiphone, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, or BAAI, held the first roadshow of its Source Innovation Plan at the Zhongguancun International Technology Exchange Center on Oct 26. Five projects presented: Linjiehe Technology, Lingshu Qizhi, Zhangliangchang Technology, Cangqiong Jizhi and Qianxiangliang Technology. They focus respectively on 3D selector V-RRAM chips, neuromorphic embodied intelligence, Hamiltonian world models, reliable physical intelligence in extreme environments, and a unified world model of surface physical environments. The event also arranged meetings between projects and funds.

Yang Yang, vice president of BAAI, introduced the plan's positioning and support mechanism. The plan is aimed primarily at original technology entrepreneurship by BAAI scholars and follows principles of source innovation, rapid decision-making, small-step trials and compliant transformation, according to the report. It integrates technology, talent, capital and industrial resources and is intended to build a mechanism linking original research, startup teams and the market, beyond funding matchmaking.

According to Leiphone, Linjiehe Technology is developing 3D V-RRAM chips and a full-stack product system covering selector RRAM devices, chips, the FlagOS software ecosystem and system applications. Its team is led by a Tsinghua University national-level young talent and received a provincial-level natural science first prize in 2025. Lingshu Qizhi works on cross-scale multimodal perception and neuromorphic embodied intelligence, from optical devices and sensing-computing chips to models and algorithms, aiming at millisecond-level autonomous decisions. Zhangliangchang Technology is building a robot deployment engine driven by a Hamiltonian world model for high-value scenarios with high human risk; according to the project, its pretraining data efficiency is 3 to 4 orders of magnitude higher than mainstream solutions, and it has completed an angel round and was registered in Beijing's Haidian district in August 2026.

Cangqiong Jizhi focuses on reliable physical intelligence for extreme environments such as deep space and deep earth. It proposes an AI4π paradigm with a physics-embedded simulation engine, a self-evolving hierarchical brain training and inference system, and a pan-embodiment operating system. The team is led by a national-level leading talent and has received more than 10 international awards, including a top-conference outstanding paper award and a global third place at the World Humanoid Robot Games; it has won 10 million yuan-level orders in park maintenance and commercial space, according to the report. Qianxiangliang Technology has developed the Earth World Model, or EWM, which represents atmospheric forcing, solar radiation, soil, vegetation, water, mountains, the carbon cycle and human systems such as power stations, farmland, industry and infrastructure in a unified latent space. Its model service is billed by token, and new-energy scenarios have been verified at 12 sites in five countries; in photovoltaic scenarios it uses its Boson series cleaning and maintenance robots as execution terminals.

Leiphone reported that BAAI's scholar program has more than 180 scholars after seven years and has incubated more than 20 technology companies with core technical capabilities, including Zhipu AI and ModelBest. The Source Innovation Plan roadshow was presented as a step in turning that talent pool into industrial activity.