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China’s AI ambitions are being propelled by 75-year-old Harvard grad Andrew Chi-Chih Yao through impact on start-ups
- Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, one of AI’s most influential figures, has exerted a profound impact on the country’s technology pioneers while at Tsinghua University
- Yao’s acolytes have created start-ups worth more than US$12 billion at their peak, including AI firms Megvii and Pony.ai
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- Andrew Chi-Chih Yao attends an HKUST seminar on “Quantum Computing: A Great Science in the Making” on January 28, 2016. Photo: SCMP/Edmond So
At a time when the US and China are divided on everything from economics to human rights, artificial intelligence is still a point of particular friction. With the potential to revolutionise everything from food production and healthcare to financial markets and surveillance, it’s a technology that sparks both optimism and paranoia.
One of the field’s most influential figures is Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, whose education and professional life have straddled the world’s two biggest economies. China-born and Harvard-trained, Yao is his country’s only recipient of the Turing Award, computer science’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize. After almost 40 years in the US, he returned to China in 2004. Now he teaches a prestigious yet little-known university class that has shaped some of the country’s biggest AI start-ups, informed government policy and moulded a generation of academics.
“We have a very good opportunity in the next 10 or 20 years, when artificial intelligence will change the world,” Yao said in May 2019. He urged China to “take a step ahead of others, to cultivate our talents and work on our research”. The scientist, who rarely speaks to foreign media, didn’t respond to Bloomberg’s requests for an interview.
At a time when the US and China are divided on everything from economics to human rights, artificial intelligence is still a point of particular friction. With the potential to revolutionise everything from food production and healthcare to financial markets and surveillance, it’s a technology that sparks both optimism and paranoia.
One of the field’s most influential figures is Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, whose education and professional life have straddled the world’s two biggest economies. China-born and Harvard-trained, Yao is his country’s only recipient of the Turing Award, computer science’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize. After almost 40 years in the US, he returned to China in 2004. Now he teaches a prestigious yet little-known university class that has shaped some of the country’s biggest AI start-ups, informed government policy and moulded a generation of academics.
“We have a very good opportunity in the next 10 or 20 years, when artificial intelligence will change the world,” Yao said in May 2019. He urged China to “take a step ahead of others, to cultivate our talents and work on our research”. The scientist, who rarely speaks to foreign media, didn’t respond to Bloomberg’s requests for an interview.
Meet the 75-year-old propelling China’s AI ambitions forward
Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, one of AI’s most influential figures, has exerted a profound impact on the country’s technology pioneers, who have gone on to start multibillion-dollar start-ups.
www.scmp.com
