As the technological competition between the United States and China intensifies, Chinese information technology (IT) corporations and universities are actively recruiting overseas professionals.
According to a report by the Hong Kong South China Morning Post (SCMP) on the 20th, Wu Yonghui, a former vice president of DeepMind, an artificial intelligence (AI) research corporation under Google, recently joined ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
Multiple sources reported that Wu Yonghui has been appointed as the head of basic research in the AI research and development department "Seed" at ByteDance, and he will directly report to CEO Liang Rubo.
He obtained a master's degree in statistics from Nanjing University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Riverside. He joined Google in 2008 and worked in the fields of machine learning and natural language understanding for 17 years. In September 2023, he was promoted to "Google Fellow," the highest engineer position at Google, and subsequently served as a vice president of research at DeepMind before recently transitioning to ByteDance.
China's largest e-commerce corporation Alibaba has also started recruiting talent in the AI sector. Recently, they hired Steven Hoi, a former professor at Singapore Management University, as a vice president to lead consumer-focused AI business research. Hoi, an expert in machine learning, was elected as a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2019 and founded the applied AI research company HyperGAI in 2023.
Additionally, Wang Huayu, who worked as an engineer at Apple's headquarters in the United States, recently joined his alma mater, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), as a professor in the Integrated Circuit (IC) department, mentoring the next generation. He earned his Ph.D. with research on IC hardware safety design and electronic design automation (EDA) from the University of Florida and participated in the research and development of M3 and M4 chips at Qualcomm and Synopsys before joining Apple.
SCMP mentioned Professor Sun Nan from Tsinghua University's Department of Electronic Engineering as an example of a technology talent who returned from the United States. After graduating from Tsinghua, he obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard University and secured a tenured position at the University of Texas at Austin, but returned to his alma mater in 2020. Recently, Tsinghua announced through social media that Professor Sun's research team contributed to the development of 50 cutting-edge semiconductor chips over the past four years.
Meanwhile, Luo Puri, known as the "AI genius girl born in '95," has recently left the AI startup DeepSeek and has begun working at a new job, as reported by Chinese media. He gained attention last year when he received a recruiting offer of 10 million yuan (about 20 million won) from Xiaomi founder Lei Jun, but his current new workplace has not been disclosed.
Luo Puri requested on social media on the 18th, saying, "Please allow me to work quietly," urging the public to refrain from excessive attention.