Kai-Fu Lee

If artificial intelligence has a bridge between Silicon Valley and Asia, that bridge has a name: Kai-Fu Lee. This Taiwanese scientist, born in Taipei in 1961, came to the United States to study at Columbia and then Carnegie Mellon, and from an early age he understood something that many in the field took decades to accept: that AI was not the exclusive domain of American or European labs, but a global game where China would have a great deal to say.

His first major technical contribution came in 1988, when his doctoral dissertation at Carnegie Mellon produced SPHINX, the first large-vocabulary, continuous, speaker-independent speech recognition system. That work laid the foundation for the modern voice recognition we use daily to dictate to our phones. Ten years later, in 1998, he founded Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, a lab that became the seed of nearly all of China's tech elite: its alumni went on to lead AI at Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and Lenovo. In 2018 he published "AI Superpowers," the book that best explained why China and the United States would become the two AI superpowers, with radically different but equally powerful approaches.

Kai-Fu Lee's life also has a chapter that went off script. In September 2013 he was diagnosed with stage IV follicular non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. That diagnosis forced him to stop and reconsider what truly mattered: it was then that he began speaking about affection, family, and the work that gives meaning to a life, topics you would not expect from a tech executive of his caliber. In 2015 he announced a full recovery. And in 2023, with renewed energy, he founded 01.AI in Beijing, a generative AI startup that reached a billion-dollar valuation in just eight months, releasing the open model Yi-34B in November of that year. TIME named him among the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023.

To me, Kai-Fu Lee's lesson is that of someone who saw further than everyone else, both in geography and in time. When Silicon Valley was only looking inward, he was already building the future of AI in Asia. And when success seemed guaranteed, an illness reminded him that the most powerful technology in the world cannot replace love or purpose. If you use AI today to work smarter, create faster, or learn without limits, he helped pave that path decades before ChatGPT even existed.