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‘I have to do it’: Why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China
In 2020, after spending half his life in the US, Song-Chun Zhu took a one-way ticket to China. Now he might hold the key to who wins the global AI race
American companies such as OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic have collectively invested billions of dollars on the premise that, equipped with enough data and computing power, models built from neural networks – mathematical systems loosely based on neurons in the brain – could lead humanity to the holy grail of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Around the same time, an assistant professor at Princeton named Fei-Fei Li released ImageNet, a larger dataset containing more than 3 million labelled images of common objects such as dogs, chairs and bicycles. In the mid-to-late 2010s, as neural networks were making startling progress on problems from facial recognition to disease diagnosis, Zhu was reading philosophy – the Confucians “understand the world much better than AI researchers”, he told me – and working quietly on his cognitive architecture.
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