Chinese Academy of Sciences ZhiJing Zing Social Intelligence Model Tackles AI's Most Embarrassing Weakness: An AI System That Understands Social Context, Emotions, and Unspoken Signals

The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ CAS ICT unveiled ZhiJing, a social-intelligence AI system, on July 24.

It also released SoMBench, a new benchmark for social intelligence, and a training pipeline using FLARE data generation, two-stage reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation.

In tests against 20 leading models, SoMBench showed that social reasoning is still hard; Zing-27B beat GPT-5.5 on a composite score and several social-cognition tasks.

The release highlights social intelligence as a measurable AI capability with potential for safer, more natural human-AI interaction.