ByteDance, Alibaba and Other Major Chinese Big Tech
AI Chief Technology Officers Leave to Start New Ventures
Chinese AI Unicorns Raise Billions of Dollars
As Chinese investors are scrambling to find promising artificial intelligence (AI) startups, a boom in entrepreneurship among AI experts aiming to create the "next-generation OpenAI" is underway, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on the 28th.
According to local media cited by SCMP, an "exodus" of top-tier AI experts is occurring at China's two major video platforms, ByteDance and Kuaishou. This means AI experts are leaving their companies to start their own ventures.
Yang Hongxia, who had been involved in large language model (LLM) research and development at ByteDance, recently resigned to prepare her own AI project. LLM is the core technology behind generative AI services like ChatGPT.
Fu Ruizi, the head of technology at Kuaishou, also resigned to pursue an AI startup project, and Jia Yangqing, who led the computing platform division of Alibaba Cloud, left early last year to join a startup focused on AI infrastructure.
The background to their move into entrepreneurship is interpreted as the recent boom in China's AI industry, which has attracted massive investment. So far, four AI "unicorn" companies (valued at over $1 billion) have emerged in China: Baichuan, Jifu AI, Moonshot AI, and Minimax. All these companies have successfully raised billions of dollars from investors.
Earlier, Wang Changhu, who led the vision technology division at ByteDance, also resigned and founded a company called AI Sphere last year, securing new investment in March.
As this trend of AI talent outflow continues, Chinese big tech companies such as Baidu and Huawei are reportedly making every effort to attract AI talent by offering high salaries and generous welfare benefits, SCMP said.
For example, shopping platform Pinduoduo strengthened its recruitment advertisements across various fields, offering LLM developers working at its Shanghai headquarters a monthly salary of 60,000 yuan (about 11 million KRW) as of November last year.
Meanwhile, Alibaba Group recently acquired about a 36% stake in AI startup Moonshot, regarded as the "Chinese OpenAI," for $800 million (about 1 trillion KRW), becoming its largest shareholder. Moonshot's generative chatbot "Kimi" reportedly surpassed Baidu's "Ernie Bot," a major Chinese internet search company, in visitor numbers last month.
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