AsianFin — At the Frontier of Science plenary session of the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Shanghai AI Laboratory officially launched and open-sourced Intern-S1, a scientific multimodal foundation model developed under its “Intern” model family.

Intern-S1 is the first open-source general-purpose model to integrate advanced scientific capabilities. Building on the existing Intern series, it pioneers a “cross-modal scientific reasoning engine” that enables deep understanding and problem-solving across disciplines such as chemistry, materials science, and earth sciences. In benchmark tests, Intern-S1 has outperformed leading closed-source models like Grok-4 on specialized scientific tasks.

Shanghai AI Lab reports that Intern-S1 also leads mainstream open-source multimodal models—such as InternVL3 and Qwen2.5-VL—in overall cross-modal capabilities.

In parallel, the lab unveiled Intern-Discovery, a scientific discovery platform designed to support researchers through the full cycle of hypothesis generation to experimental validation. The platform is now open to global applicants for trial access.