Shanghai AI Laboratory has introduced its open-weights, science-oriented multimodal foundation model, Intern-S2-397B, on the Hugging Face and ModelScope platforms. The announcement followed a presentation at the Putian Innovation Forum on September 13, 2026, and a laboratory briefing on September 21.
The official English name of the laboratory is Shanghai AI Laboratory / Intern-S2. This release differs from recent lab publications, such as Atria Dawn, Intern Physical World Model W0, and NCP-ArchPreview, as it represents the release of weights for a scientific model architecture, rather than an announcement of another agent or world model.
The Intern-S2 model is designed to perform long-horizon scientific tasks and agent cycles. Lab materials emphasize the inclusion of a pluggable Memory Decoder, which allows domain modules to be attached without retraining the entire base model. For instance, using Intern-MemDec-4B in biological experiments increased average scores on Biological Instructions from approximately 56.92 to 60.32 while maintaining overall results at the level of the base model.
Hugging Face indicates that the Intern-S2-397B card contains about 403 billion parameters. The model underwent visual pre-training on pages of raw scientific literature, multi-domain scientific reinforcement learning across more than 20 fields, and long-horizon agent reinforcement learning in isolated environments. Support for deployment is provided through LMDeploy, vLLM, and SGLang, and the official Intern API endpoint is documented.
Shanghai AI Laboratory reports that Intern-S2 is deeply optimized in conjunction with Huawei's Ascend computing stack regarding computation, communication, and memory aspects. Furthermore, the model will be integrated into the lab's Intern DuanYan scientific discovery platform, which covers life sciences, materials, semiconductors, and related disciplines. According to vendor statements, Intern-S2 ranks first among open-source models in knowledge, code, and agent sets, demonstrating strong performance in biology and materials science tasks; however, these figures are currently internal lab data pending independent testing.
For research groups, the end result is access to the downloadable Intern-S2-397B weights, accompanied by documentation on the Memory Decoder and a note on collaboration with Ascend. Thus, this is an open multimodal foundation model updated for community use, not merely an announcement based on a closed API.



