2025 WIC Distinguished Contribution Award

Growth Potential award-winning enterprise: Li Auto

Founded on July 1, 2015, Li Auto is headquartered in Beijing's Shunyi district and operates self-built intelligent manufacturing bases in Changzhou city, East China's Jiangsu province, and in Beijing. 

The company's mission is to "Create a Mobile Home, Create Happiness," with a vision of becoming a "globally leading artificial intelligence terminal company". 

Its shares are dual-listed on the Nasdaq and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and is the first Chinese new energy vehicle startup to deliver more than 1 million vehicles.

Li Auto has developed a range of proprietary technologies, including extended-range electric systems, high-voltage battery electric platforms, assisted driving, intelligent cockpits, and intelligent manufacturing. By integrating AI into its products, the company serves family users and enables homes to grow together with AI.

Advancing assisted driving through AI and large models

In the field of assisted driving, Li Auto has made sustained investments in the research and application of AI and large-model technologies. 

The company has completed full-scale deployment of an "end-to-end + VLM" model across 10 million video clips. Building on best practice from its dual-system architecture and a keen understanding of cutting-edge technologies, Li Auto unveiled a new high-level assisted driving solution, MindVLA, in March 2025, which is based on a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) large model.

VLA represents a new paradigm in large models for robotics. It equips assisted driving systems with strong 3D spatial understanding, logical reasoning and behavior generation capabilities — enabling them to perceive, think and adapt to their environment. 

In August 2025, alongside the delivery of the Li i8, Li Auto began rolling out the VLA driver large model, followed by deployment to all AD Max users in September, marking a new historical stage in the development and application of assisted driving technologies.

Building an Intelligent Cockpit powered by Multimodal AI

In the area of intelligent cockpit development, Li Auto's fully self-developed multimodal cognitive large model — MindGPT —  became the first automaker-developed large model to complete filing under China's Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services.

Built on the proprietary MindGPT foundation model, Li Xiang Tongxue has evolved from a voice assistant into an intelligent agent. Through AI, it supports customized application development and services — such as automatic parking fee payments — further expanding the in-vehicle service ecosystem and enhancing user convenience.

Looking ahead: AI-driven innovation and the future of mobility

Moving forward, Li Auto will continue to drive technological advancement through AI, using innovation to elevate its brand and strengthen product capabilities. Through sustained innovation, the company aims to demonstrate its competitiveness in AI and future mobility technologies.

In 2024, the World Internet Conference established the WIC Distinguished Contribution Award to recognize individuals and enterprises that have made outstanding contributions in global internet-related fields. 

To date, 12 leading figures and 26 well-known business enterprises from around the world have received the award.

For enterprises, the award features three categories — Social Contribution, Innovation Breakthrough, and Growth Potential. 

The awarded companies span a wide range of sectors — including internet platforms, mobile communications, artificial intelligence, chip designs, energy and power and cybersecurity. 

Together, they depict a diverse and thriving internet ecosystem, encouraging more outstanding enterprises to engage in the development of the internet and to jointly explore the limitless possibilities of the digital future.