Automakers maintain connections with AI and top talents through investment.

Written by丨Li Anqi

Edited by丨Gong Fangyi

We have learned exclusively that on August 24, NIO CEO Li Bin announced at a company-wide meeting that the head of intelligent driving, Ren Shaoqing, has established an independent company focused on physical AI foundational models and embodied intelligence. NIO will strategically invest and collaborate with this new company. Sources say, “The meeting was brief and did not mention any organizational changes.”

A person participating in the meeting stated that Li Bin and Ren Shaoqing clearly indicated that Ren Shaoqing will continue to serve as the head of NIO's intelligent driving business.

With the establishment of the new company, how Ren Shaoqing will allocate his focus between NIO's intelligent driving business and the new company will become a point of interest for the public. We understand that the new company established by Ren Shaoqing has completed its registration and has achieved a unicorn-level valuation.

Sources close to NIO's management indicated that NIO has long been focused on cutting-edge AI technologies and is positioning itself in the industry through a combination of independent research and development and open collaboration. In recent years, NIO has consistently invested in key technology fields such as chips and operating systems, achieving significant advancements while continuously supporting the development of innovative enterprises through strategic partnerships and industry synergies in areas such as embodied intelligence, algorithm models, intelligent hardware, new energy, and computing infrastructure.

Since joining NIO in 2020, Ren Shaoqing has driven the mass production and research of NIO's advanced intelligent driving systems, witnessing the evolution of NIO's intelligent driving algorithms from traditional modular solutions to new architectures like end-to-end and world models. He also helped facilitate the mass production of NIO's self-developed intelligent driving chip, Shenqi NX9031, transitioning the hardware platform from four Nvidia Orin chips to one self-developed Shenqi chip.

In terms of specific pathways, NIO started world model research in 2023, plans to release a world model for intelligent assisted driving in 2024, and begin mass production delivery in 2025. In June of this year, NIO completed the release of a new version of the world model, covering over 700,000 users. The new version upgrades the technical framework to “world model + supervised fine-tuning + closed-loop reinforcement learning,” with both sourced chips and self-developed chip platforms releasing concurrently.

In addition to his role at NIO, in September 2025, Ren Shaoqing joined the University of Science and Technology of China as a chair professor, doctoral advisor, and director of the General Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, focusing on areas including artificial intelligence, world models, embodied intelligence, deep learning, and AI for Science.

Intelligent driving is one of the most mature large-scale application scenarios for AI in the physical world. It has continuity with embodied intelligence in foundational capabilities such as perception, prediction, planning, control, world modeling, and reinforcement learning. In the past two years, an increasing number of talents in autonomous driving and intelligent driving have moved towards the robotics industry, which is also related to this technological migration.

Rather than incubating complete robotics businesses internally, technical backbones are increasingly choosing to start up outside of automakers. However, automakers need to maintain connections with AI technologies and talents. Ideal Auto has strategically invested in the embodied company Xieyue Intelligence, founded by the president of the second product line Zhang Qiang and chief AI scientist Chen Wei; Xiaopeng's incubated robotics company also announced today that it has completed its first round of over $900 million in financing, with a post-investment valuation exceeding $6.3 billion (about 43 billion yuan).

Image source: NIO Automotive

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