Turing Award winners speak at Beijing AI conference

The eighth Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) Conference opens at Zhongguancun International Innovation Center in Beijing, June 12, 2026. [Photo by Liu Sitong/China.org.cn]

The eighth Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) Conference opened at Zhongguancun International Innovation Center in Beijing on June 12, with two Turing Award winners addressing the opening ceremony.

Whitfield Diffie, who shared the 2015 Turing Award with Martin Hellman for their foundational work in modern cryptography, spoke about AI and security at the event.

Cryptography was the "best-cooked part" of information security, Diffie said, and AI could help improve how cryptographic systems are tested and validated.

Envisioning the future of human society, Diffie predicted that by 2050, or even earlier, machines will be doing everything, and people will find they simply cannot do without them.

Whitfield Diffie, who won the Turing Award in 2015, engages in a dialogue at the eighth Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) Conference in Beijing, June 12, 2026. [Photo by Liu Sitong/China.org.cn]

In conversation with Li Chaozhuo, an AI security researcher at the BAAI, Diffie expressed optimism about the relationship between humans and AI, saying each would come to understand the other better over time.

Andrew Barto, Turing Award laureate of 2024, delivers a speech on reinforcement learning at the eighth Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) Conference in Beijing, June 12, 2026. [Photo by Liu Sitong/China.org.cn]

Speaking via video link, Andrew Barto, the 2024 Turing Award laureate known for his foundational contributions to reinforcement learning, traced the field's deep connections to neural networks.

The two disciplines share tightly intertwined histories, he said, having both originated as hypotheses about how the brain functions and learns, with their development coupled from the very beginning.

Barto also said that combining the computational power of deep reinforcement learning with recent findings on the brain's reward system may point the way to the next wave of advances.

The two-day annual event featured more than 200 experts and scholars and 40 business founders and executives. A total of 25 thematic seminars and 200 presentations and dialogues took place on June 12 and 13, covering frontier topics such as AI agents, world models, embodied intelligence and AI self-evolution.

Since 2019, the conference has welcomed attendees from more than 30 countries, hosted over 1,000 leading experts, including a dozen Turing Award laureates, and attracted more than 600,000 registered participants.

The BAAI was established in 2018 as a research and development institution with the aim of building a world-class academic and technological innovation ecosystem.

Last June, it released the WuJie Series of AI models, including a native multimodal world model, a general foundational model for brain science and an embodied brain model.