Zhiyuan Institute of Artificial Intelligence (智源研究院), commonly referred to in English as the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), is a Beijing-based non-profit, new-type AI R&D institute that positions itself as a hub for original research, talent aggregation, and ecosystem-building around frontier AI, including large foundation models and open collaboration across academia and industry. In the context of digital humans, its relevance is most visible through its work on large-scale pretrained multimodal models such as the WuDao (悟道) model line, which has been framed publicly as enabling downstream “digital person” style applications by providing language, knowledge, and multimodal generation capabilities that can be coupled to a human-like persona and interface. A widely cited exemplar linked to this ecosystem is the virtual student Hua Zhibing (华智冰), described by Tsinghua University as jointly “cultivated” with BAAI alongside Zhipu AI and Xiaoice, with WuDao 2.0 referenced as a core technical basis; in practice, this positions BAAI less as a character studio and more as a foundation-model and research infrastructure provider that partners with universities and companies to prototype human-like digital agents with synthesized identity, voice/appearance layers, and evolving cognitive skills. More broadly, official Beijing reporting has grouped BAAI’s WuDao achievements in the same cluster of “major original成果” as high-profile “general intelligent human” demonstrations (for example “Tongtong,” 通通), reflecting how BAAI’s role is often understood institutionally as part of the city’s digital-human and agentic-AI innovation stack even when specific digital-human systems may be led by other organizations.