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Artificial intelligence
TechPolicy

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
Bloomberg
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.
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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.

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The “Yao Class” – an undergraduate computer science course at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, alma mater to President Xi Jinping and many of China’s ruling elite – has exerted a profound impact on the country’s technology pioneers and growing scientific prowess. Its graduates form a powerful network across the country, advising on each others’ projects and pooling resources and capital where needed.

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