Insiders often say that the frontier of computing power is electricity, and the frontier of electricity is hard problems.
A young audience member stood in the crowd after the event ended, in no hurry to leave. He stopped the researcher who had just finished a talk titled "How Much Longer Until the 'Artificial Sun' Lights Up Every Home?" and did not ask "What use is this?" Instead, he went straight to the hardest question: "You've broken through on discharge duration. So next, where exactly is the bottleneck on the heat resistance limits of materials?"
The same scene played out during the daytime sessions as soon as the panel discussions ended. Someone chased down a brain-computer interface expert and asked: "Since paralyzed patients can now type with their thoughts, how much longer until they can truly return to work, or even take care of themselves again?" Others surrounded Professor Qi Mingjing from Beihang University to explore how an electrostatic flying device lighter than a sheet of A4 paper can withstand real wind resistance.
These questions carried no pleasantries, only a relentless digging into frontier technology. At a science gala, what is truly worth watching was never just what happened on stage.
On October 31, at Shougang Park in Beijing, the 2026 bilibili Super Science Gala took place. The daytime sessions covered industry and frontier topics, the evening brought experiments onto the stage, and after it ended, young people carried their questions off the stage.
What deserves the most attention through this window is not on the stage, but in the direction of these questions.
From left to right: Bilibili UP host Yin You Shi Ren Ji De, Chinese Academy of Sciences academician Peng Chengzhi, and Global AI Innovation Governance Center deputy director Jiang Changjian.
Learning is being redefined in the AI era
There has already been plenty of discussion about how to learn in the AI era. But the answer given on the science gala stage was more direct.
On the daytime "NEXT Stage," UP host @Lao Shi Tan Xin and BioMap CEO Liu Wei explored a question: as AI develops so rapidly and reaches even deeper into scientific research, will ordinary people feel that they no longer need to learn and can simply hand all the work to AI?
This confusion about "passion" versus "dependence" speaks directly to the widespread anxiety of young people in the AI era. Liu Wei's way out was human thinking ability and uniqueness. He said that AI's significance lies in replacing simple, repetitive labor, and that what matters for people is to play the role of decision-maker and to experiment across multiple fields, thereby mastering the use of AI in those fields.
Looking at the audience, UP host @Lao Shi Tan Xin summed it up: "You must continuously cultivate your ability to think independently. AI can give you ten thousand answers, but we need to judge which of those answers is correct." When AI takes over complicated computation, the core value of humans will focus more on asking questions and judging direction.
The same logic carried into the afternoon battery discussion. UP host @Suo Zhang Wy raised a highly relatable question: "We used AA batteries in the early years without much concern, but now when we talk about new energy vehicle batteries, people are especially anxious. Why has everyone's anxiety shifted?"
Li Hong, a researcher at the Institute of Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, gave a scientific explanation: the core reason is that the two have completely different material systems, capacities, energy levels, and actual operating conditions. Once a power battery loses control, the potential risk is indeed greater. Ultimately, it still comes down to the challenge posed by "energy density."
Bilibili is soil where attention grows into creativity
After seeing this clearly, one change is worth noting: in the past, when young people encountered technology content, they largely relied on retelling and digesting achievements already made in the West. Those achievements matter, but they are "things that have already happened."
This year at the science gala, the people surrounded and questioned were working on the steady-state operation of an artificial sun, on brain-computer interfaces giving patients a new way of life, and on 500 people playing a game simultaneously with brainwaves.
During the daytime "Future Answers" segment, Chen Shuguang, founder of Da Hang Yue Qian, was pressed by young people: "If more and more companies send satellites into space in the future, will space also get 'traffic jams'?" After the evening session ended, several UP hosts surrounded Professor Qi Mingjing from Beihang University, trying to understand the material limits behind a flying device lighter than a sheet of A4 paper.
Young people's attention is shifting from "what others have accomplished" to "what we are doing right now." The hard problems they ask about are the hard problems Chinese scientists are currently tackling. This also illustrates a fact: much of what is happening at China's technological frontier is becoming more specific and more grounded.
Wang Teng, associate researcher at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science and the Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
This shift is the most honest signal of "the turning point moment for Chinese technology." The turning point is not only a breakthrough in technical indicators, but also a shift in the attention coordinates of an entire generation.
And Bilibili's role in this is by no means just a "magnifying glass." It is more like soil that continuously provides nutrients. Over the past year, cumulative user watch time for science popularization and technology knowledge content on Bilibili exceeded 2.3 billion hours, bringing together 1.33 million related UP hosts, with more than 3,200 professional researchers and technology companies joining to share.
This extremely diverse set of interest communities precisely captures young people's thirst for knowledge. Here, professionals and science popularization UP hosts are good at breaking down dry, hardcore content and crushing it into digestible pieces, greatly lowering the threshold for ordinary people to understand frontier technology.
Bilibili's community atmosphere naturally encourages deep interaction between creators and viewers. Young people's bullet-screen questions and enthusiasm for making derivative works not only push more researchers to step forward, but also nurture a thriving technology ecosystem. For example, in Bilibili's "build in bilibili · AI Creation Open Competition," among more than 30,000 entries, 64% of participants had no professional development background and 25% were students. In the "AI Creation Competition," UP host DiDi_OK even won a major award at the Venice Film Festival with the AI video work "Website."
Bilibili did not manufacture interest out of thin air. Instead, by providing tools and an inclusive community environment, it allows young people's curiosity and creativity to gather and erupt. Here, science communication is no longer one-way "popularization," but has become two-way "presence" and true "co-creation."
Where gazes burn hot is where the future grows
China's technological development cannot be separated from young people. At the science gala, this statement had concrete direction.
When Professor Dou Hongjing's team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University demonstrated an artificial platelet experiment that achieved "clotting in 3 seconds" and firmly sealed natural blood, applause broke out in the audience. When Wang Teng, associate researcher at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science and the Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, presented the new record of "100 million degrees plus 1,066 seconds" and mentioned that "once fusion energy is available, AI development will have no ceiling," the young people below held their breath. That statement immediately became the starting point for the next round of questions.
They are both the truth-seeking learners in the audience and the people who turn questions into bullet-screen comments, bullet-screen comments into derivative works, and derivative works into the next discussion. And they are precisely the most typical user profile of Bilibili.
What a science gala can do is set the stage well, bring the latest achievements onstage, put academicians and UP hosts in the same space, and let the questioning happen. What it cannot do is decide for young people where to direct their gaze.
But after watching this year's event, the direction is already very clear: toward what is happening now, toward China's own frontier, and toward the places that still have no answers but are worth shouting toward together.
Relying on long-term accumulated science content and UP host creations, Bilibili is gathering these scattered, burning questions. Researchers speak onstage, young people ask below, and the audience continues the discussion in the community. The science gala turns science from one-way explanation onstage into an interactive event for everyone, not only giving young people an entry point to understand frontier technology, but also making Bilibili truly the first platform for young Chinese people to learn about technological progress and understand scientific development.
The gaze of young people is burning hot. Where that burning gaze lands, the future there will grow a little faster.
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