Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence
- Chinese name
- 北京通用人工智能研究院
- Pinyin
- Unified Social Credit Code
52110000MJ01512113registered in Beijing 北京- Website
- 北京通用人工智能研究院 (Official · Channel)
The Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (北京通用人工智能研究院, BIGAI) is a non-profit research institute in Beijing’s Haidian district, created in 2020 as one of the city’s new-type R&D institutions and led by AI scientist Zhu Songchun (朱松纯). It is registered as a private non-enterprise unit (民办非企业单位).
Its best-known work is Tongtong (通通), which BIGAI presents as the world’s first general intelligent agent: a virtual girl with a 3D body and the cognitive abilities of a three-to-four-year-old child, driven by a value system and causal reasoning rather than a data-driven large model. Tongtong was first shown publicly in January 2024 at the Zhongguancun Exhibition Center and has appeared at the Zhongguancun Forum each year since.
At the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum, Tongtong 3.0 guided visitors through an “AI town”, a simulated world of 12 million square metres with streets, a kindergarten and other agents, in which she converses with the digital humans she meets. BIGAI’s teams are also transferring her skills to physical robots.