At the 2026 Xiamen Sci-Tech Industry and Securities Development Conference held on September 6, Li Jing, Chief Strategy Officer of Stepfun, said AI has officially entered the era of intelligent agents, with the focus shifting from human-machine chat to autonomous task execution.
Li noted that 2022 saw AI models achieve language understanding and human-machine interaction, while 2024 saw the rise of reasoning models for code and mathematics. The industry has now fully entered the intelligent agent stage, with AI shifting from passive response to active task execution.
He disclosed that as of June 2026, Codex's token consumption has far exceeded that of pure chat interaction models, with tokens from autonomous agent use reaching nearly 5 times the scale of human operations. This data marks the formation of a new AI computing paradigm where agents can independently complete complex, long-horizon tasks across industries.
Industry leaders at the conference agreed that AI is now shifting from R&D breakthroughs to market validation, with patient capital and international capital markets playing an increasingly important role.
Source: Xinhua / China Securities Journal
