Kai-Fu Lee

Overview

Kai-Fu Lee is a computer scientist and technology executive born in Taipei on 3 December 1961^[1]. His career runs through speech-recognition research, industrial research laboratories, the Chinese operations of a major internet company, venture investing and, most recently, the building of a foundation-model company.

Education and speech-recognition research

Lee earned a B.S. in computer science from Columbia University in 1983 and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988^[1]. His dissertation described Sphinx, a large-vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system^[1].

Those three adjectives describe a hard combination of goals. "Large vocabulary" means the system is meant to handle ordinary spoken language rather than a handful of commands; "continuous" means it should cope with words run together in normal speech instead of one word at a time with pauses between; and "speaker-independent" means a new user should not have to record samples so the system can learn his or her voice first. Speech recognition systems of that era generally traded these properties against each other — a system could be accurate on a small set of words, or work for one enrolled speaker, but not easily both at once. Sphinx was an attempt to build a recogniser that relaxed those constraints.

Apple, Silicon Graphics and Microsoft

Lee worked at Apple from 1990 to 1996 and at Silicon Graphics from 1996 to 1998^[1]. In 1998 he founded Microsoft Research China, which later became Microsoft Research Asia, and then served as a Microsoft corporate vice president until 2005^[1].

Corporate research laboratories of this kind occupy an unusual place in the technology industry: they are expected to do open-ended research and to publish and train scientists, while remaining connected to products their parent company can eventually use. Founding and running such a lab means building a research culture from scratch — hiring, choosing problems, and setting the relationship between research and the business.

Google China and investing

From 2005 to 2009 Lee was president of Google China^[1]. In 2009 he co-founded the venture firm Innovation Works, later renamed Sinovation Ventures^[1]. Venture firms and incubators of this sort put money and operational help into young companies, usually in exchange for a share of ownership, and in China they often work closely with founders on hiring and product decisions rather than only providing capital.

Writing on artificial intelligence

Lee wrote the book AI Superpowers in 2018 and AI 2041 in 2021, the latter with the writer Chen Qiufan^[1]. Both books are addressed to a general readership rather than to specialists; AI 2041 pairs fictional scenarios with explanatory chapters, using stories to make claims about how the technology might be used.

01.AI

In 2023 Lee founded the AI company 01.AI in Beijing and serves as its founder and CEO, according to the company's About page^[2]. The company's About page states: "In May 2023, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee founded 01.AI, an AI 2.0 foundation-model unicorn."^[2] The company also says that 01.AI became a unicorn — the industry term for an unlisted company valued at more than one billion dollars — within six months of its founding^[2].

The founding date is recorded differently in different places: the company's own About page gives May 2023^[2], while Wikipedia entries give March 2023^[1][4].

01.AI works on foundation models: very large models trained on broad collections of data that can then be adapted to many different tasks instead of being built for one narrow purpose. This is a capital- and talent-intensive kind of work, which is why the company's rapid growth in valuation drew attention.

Place in the field

The Wire China describes Lee as having earned a doctorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University^[3]. Across his career he has moved between research, the management of research organisations, executive roles at large companies, investing and founding a company of his own — a path that follows the same research field from laboratory work to commercial products.

^[1]: Wikipedia, "Kai-Fu Lee". ^[2]: 01.AI, "About Us". ^[3]: The Wire China, "Who's Who: China's AI Industry". ^[4]: Wikipedia, "01.AI".