Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee was born in Taiwan and grew up in the United States.⁠[1]

After emigrating from Taiwan to the United States, he attended high school in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then studied computer science at Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry and Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry, earning a PhD for a thesis built around a speech recognition system that was cutting-edge for its time.⁠[2]

At Carnegie Mellon he built a program that defeated the world Othello champion in 1988, one of the first examples of a computer beating the best human player at a game; he also developed the world’s first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system.⁠[3]

At Apple he led AI projects in speech recognition and natural language processing that were featured on Good Morning America and the front page of The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

In 1998 he joined Microsoft in Asia and founded its China research lab, later leaving and being rehired to work at the Redmond campus; court filings showed Microsoft had paid him more than $3 million since August 2000.⁠[4]

Microsoft Research China was named the “hottest research lab” by MIT Technology Review in 2004; later renamed Microsoft Research Asia, it trained many of the AI leaders at Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Lenovo, Huawei and Haier.⁠[5]

In July 2005 GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry announced it had hired him to lead a new research center in China; Microsoft, where he had been corporate vice president of the Interactive Services Division, sued him and Google, saying the move violated his non-competition promise.⁠[6]

In September 2005, Google said in a court filing that before trial he would not work in the technical areas named in Microsoft’s proposed injunction, but would open a product development center in China staffed with non-Microsoft personnel.⁠[7]

On September 13, 2005, King County Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez ruled that the non-compete agreement was valid but that Lee could recruit and staff Google’s China center, while barring him from work on projects he had handled at Microsoft such as search; trial was set for January.⁠[8]

In December 2005 Microsoft and Google reached a confidential settlement; he, by then president of engineering, product and public affairs for Google China, said he was pleased with the terms.⁠[4]

In September 2009, three days after announcing his resignation as head of Google’s Chinese operations, he said he had raised $115 million to create Innovation Works, backed by YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry co-founder Steve Chen, Foxconn, Legend Holdings, New Oriental and WI Harper Group; he dismissed as “outrageously wrong” suggestions that his departure was linked to censorship rules or competition from Baidu.⁠[1]

Sinovation Ventures says Lee founded it in September 2009.⁠[9]

In April 2018 he gave the TED2018 talk “How AI can save our humanity,” saying “AI is serendipity” and that it would liberate people from routine jobs and remind us what makes us human.⁠[10]

On June 26, 2018, Asia House named him winner of its 2018 Asian Business Leaders Award, to be presented in Singapore on November 22; Sinovation Ventures then managed $1.7 billion in dual-currency funds.⁠[11]

In 2018 he published AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order, which calls for the US and China to work together on AI rather than continue on a course of rivalry and mistrust.⁠[11]

In June 2019 he spoke with Chris Anderson on the TED podcast The TED Interview about the high-stakes AI competition between the West and China and what it means for the future of work.⁠[12]

On July 15, 2019, he appeared on the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast in an episode titled “AI Superpowers – China and Silicon Valley”; the episode summary describes him as chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures managing a $2 billion dual-currency fund, former president of Google China and author of seven best-selling books in Chinese.⁠[13]

On May 22, 2020, he published the WIRED essay “Covid-19 Will Accelerate the AI Health Care Revolution,” arguing that AI in disease diagnosis, drug discovery and robot delivery was already driving change after the pandemic, and that this was only the beginning.⁠[14]

In mid-September 2021, AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, co-written with science fiction writer Chen Qiufan, was released in the US and UK, imagining in ten short stories set twenty years ahead how AI will reshape the world.⁠[15]

In an excerpt he wrote that people “often overestimate what technologies can do in five years, and underestimate what they will be able to do in 20.”⁠[16]

01.AI says it was founded in Beijing in May 2023 under Kai-Fu Lee’s leadership and became a unicorn within six months.⁠[17]

In November 2023, 01.AI released its first model, the open-source bilingual Yi-34B, which ranked first among pre-trained models on a Hugging Face ranking; he said the company, which he leads as CEO, was valued at $1 billion after funding from Sinovation Ventures, Alibaba Cloud and others.⁠[18]

In May 2024, 01.AI released Yi-Large, a 100-billion-parameter foundation model; in October it released Yi-Lightning, a 100-billion-parameter MoE model that ranked sixth globally and first in China on the LMSYS blind-test leaderboard.⁠[19]

In March 2025, 01.AI released its WorldWise enterprise LLM platform; in October, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev met Lee to hear about AlemLLM, a Kazakh-language model built with 01.AI.⁠[19]

In May 2026 his AI education recommendations were incorporated into a Kazakhstan presidential decree; in June, Q.AI, a joint venture between Kazakhstan and 01.AI, was established; in July 01.AI released TrueNorth, an enterprise AI decision platform.⁠[17]

As of October 2026 he is chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and president of its Artificial Intelligence Institute.⁠[20]

Sinovation says it manages ten USD- and RMB-denominated funds with over $3 billion in assets and has backed more than 500 companies.⁠[21]

He holds honorary doctorates from Carnegie Mellon University and the City University of Hong Kong, holds 10 U.S. patents and has published more than 100 papers.⁠[5]

He was named one of TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2013 and a WIRED 25 Icon.⁠[20]

X: Public account: https://x.com/kaifulee (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaifulee/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

Sinovation Ventures: Official website: https://www.sinovationventures.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

01.AI: Official website: https://01.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]