Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee is chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and one of the most widely heard voices on artificial intelligence outside the United States. He earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation produced one of the first speaker-independent continuous speech-recognition systems.

He was the founding president of Microsoft Research Asia, went on to serve as president of Google China, and has held senior roles at Apple and SGI, a career spanning nearly every major phase of the industry.

His book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018) reframed the AI race as a contest of data and implementation rather than pure research, and AI 2041 (2021, with the novelist Chen Qiufan) projected that thesis two decades forward. He founded the large-model company 01.AI in 2023.

Lee completed a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon on speech recognition, then held senior roles at Apple, Silicon Graphics and Microsoft, where he founded Microsoft Research Asia, before serving as the founding president of Google China. He now runs Sinovation Ventures, which invests across the Chinese technology sector.

That career is the reason his perspective is difficult to source elsewhere: he has built AI research organizations on both sides of the US and China divide and invests in the companies commercializing it. AI Superpowers set out the competitive picture; AI 2041, written with the novelist Chen Qiufan, pairs near-future fiction with technical commentary. For an executive audience deciding what to do rather than learning what AI is, the investor lens is usually the more useful half.