Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee is a distinguished computer scientist, investor, and author known for his significant contributions to artificial intelligence and his leadership roles in major technology companies across the US and China. After developing Sphinx, the world’s first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system in 1988, Kai-Fu Lee went on to become a distinguished computer scientist, investor, and author. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988, where his research focused on machine learning and pattern recognition.

After his resignation from Google in 2009, he founded Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm focusing on early-stage internet and mobile startups in China, which manages US$2.5 billion in investment funds. He is also a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018), and AI 2041 (2021). Lee has been recognized by Time’s 100 most influential people in AI in 2023 and named a WIRED 25 Icon. In 2023, Lee founded 01.AI, an artificial intelligence startup dedicated to developing large language models primarily for the Chinese market.

The same year, 01.AI released Yi-34B, its first open-source model. Building on this momentum, 01.AI introduced Yi-VL-34B, a multimodal model, in 2024. Through his various leadership roles and entrepreneurial endeavors, Kai-Fu Lee consistently contributes to advancing the field of artificial intelligence and shaping the global technology landscape.