The Emotional Partnership of AI and Humans

Good afternoon everyone. It’s a great honor to be here in Shanghai, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference.

Everyone is intensely debating the future of AI today. Let me start with a key observation: no expert can fully foresee where artificial intelligence will ultimately go.

We face fundamental unanswered questions. Can AGI ever be achieved? Will intelligence become centralized in a handful of corporations, or split into countless small distributed agents? Will AI cause mass human unemployment long term? Will open-source ecosystems dominate, or closed proprietary models prevail?

Nobody has definitive answers. Different AI tracks advance at vastly different speeds; some evolve rapidly, others demand decades of slow research. This massive uncertainty will persist for at least the next five years.Yet uncertainty itself creates the greatest opportunities for innovation. Today I will focus on three major frontiers for AI over the next five years: humanoid robots, emotional intelligence for AI, and the agent economy.

First, humanoid robots.I firmly believe humanoid robots will be the most complex artifacts humanity has ever built. No engineered creation on this planet is more intricate than humanoids, except human beings themselves.

To build reliable general humanoid robots, we have to overcome three major barriers: spatial perception intelligence, high-performance bionic manipulators, and ultra-low-power sustainable energy systems.We see many demo robots walking, squatting and waving on exhibition floors, but those are only the very beginning. To operate steadily inside factories and homes, adapting to messy, unstructured real-world environments, general humanoid robots require at least another decade of continuous research.

Many hope humanoid robots will scale into mass commercial use quickly. We must separate stage demonstrations from stable all-day operation. Performing smoothly on a conference stage is a world apart from reliably working long shifts. Special-purpose industrial robots will reach commercial scale much sooner; general humanoids are a long-distance marathon.

Second, artificial emotional intelligence, the topic I want to emphasize most today.For years, researchers trained AI to improve logic, reasoning, computation and information retrieval. The next inflection point will come when artificial intelligence gains the capacity for emotional partnership with humans.

For a long time, people viewed AI merely as cold tools. In the future, genuine emotional bonds will form between humans and AI, creating an entirely new kind of partnership. This does not mean AI will develop independent consciousness. It means systems can perceive human moods, offer empathy, maintain long-term memory of preferences, and understand joy, frustration and emotion.

Many express ethical concerns about emotional AI, and those concerns deserve discussion. But the technological trend cannot be reversed. When AI is no longer only a task executor, but a companion that listens and empathizes, the human-AI relationship will be fundamentally transformed. The tool relationship evolves into a partnership. That is the era of emotional partnership between AI and humans.

Third, intelligent agents and the agent economy.Every ordinary person will own a personal intelligent agent in the future. Agents can receive your objectives, break down tasks independently, find collaborators, assign work and verify results. Going further, agents can hire one another, trade and cooperate. Eventually, an agent economy will emerge, with transaction volume far exceeding markets where only humans trade directly.

Yet the agent economy hits a critical bottleneck right now: AI cannot safely and credibly manage budgets and complete transactions autonomously. We do not necessarily need smarter large language models. What we lack is a complete supporting infrastructure: identity verification for agents, trust mechanisms, liability rules, and transaction risk control.

Critical questions follow: Who owns an intelligent agent? The developer, the platform, or the individual user? How can we build cross-platform trust between unknown agents to prevent fraud? Trust infrastructure will become foundational to the agent age.

I want to add a vital point: Artificial intelligence replaces tasks, not whole human beings.AI can take over standardized, repetitive work modules, but machines cannot bear ultimate responsibility. If actions lead to legal consequences or real-world risks, responsibility ultimately rests with humans. Mass unemployment will not happen in the short run. AI acts as a lever to expand human capabilities, just as electricity empowered all industries a century ago — it does not simply replace workers.

I also want to talk about the real rhythm of technological progress: Protopia.Many founders and media expect abrupt revolutionary leaps for AI: either immediate superintelligence or sudden catastrophic risks. Reality moves differently. AI improves gradually through compound growth: roughly one percent better each year, advancing along a spiral path. Every new technology brings new problems, and the only way to solve those new problems is to build better technology. There exists no permanent, final solution.

I continue observing China’s AI ecosystem. China’s booming open-source model community carries unique long-term advantages. Over time, token cost will become a core moat.Right now the industry burns capital freely, with little focus on inference expenses. Once commercial profitability becomes urgent, cost competition will decide winners. Within the next year, any team that can cut token costs to one tenth of today’s level will hold powerful competitive advantages. Even with slightly weaker model performance, extreme cost efficiency enables large-scale profitable deployment.

To conclude.The AI revolution has barely started; we are still in the early phase. The biggest opportunities do not lie solely in building ever-larger foundation models. The true frontier lies in bridging the digital and physical world, building emotional bonds between humans and AI, and constructing new networks for agent collaboration.

Do not fear uncertainty. Learn to live with the unknown. The ultimate direction of technology will be shaped by every innovator in this room. I look forward to seeing countless new applications emerge, and seeing AI evolve into humanity’s long-term collaborative partner.

Thank you.