Shanghai Innovation Institute

Shanghai Innovation Institute (上海创智学院, SII) is a Chinese artificial intelligence research and education institution based in Xuhui District, Shanghai, established in September 2024. It was jointly built (共建) by China's Ministry of Education and the Shanghai Municipal Government and is registered as a private non-enterprise non-profit legal entity (民办非企业单位). The institution positions itself as a new-type "research-creation" institute (研创型) that integrates research, innovation and doctoral education in AI. Within its first year it gathered over 80 full-time mentors and more than 800 doctoral students and supported the incubation of 27 student startups. Its research focuses on embodied AI and Vision-Language-Action models, world models, large language models and RL post-training, agent systems, AI for science, and AI infrastructure. SII develops numerous open-source projects (including τ0-VLA, τ0-WM, siiRL, VCCL and OpenMOSS) released through the GitHub organizations sii-research and nex-agi (the Nex-AGI alliance initiated by SII). Its operational leadership is headed by Ding Xiaodong (Party Secretary and Executive Vice Dean), while Guo Yike (Yike Guo) chairs the strategic advisory committee. At its second-anniversary conference (2026) it unveiled 12 joint laboratories with industry partners, including Li Auto, Tencent, Chery, Infini-AI (无问芯穹), Biren and Lightelligence. The institution should be distinguished from the Shanghai AI Laboratory (上海人工智能实验室) — they are separate entities.