US chip giant Nvidia has hired two prominent artificial intelligence (AI) experts who hail from China, underscoring the rising global recognition of talent from the mainland and their key contributions to the field’s advancement.
Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao, both alumni of China’s Tsinghua University, said on their respective social media accounts that they joined Nvidia, sharing photos of themselves with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of the company.
Zhu, who received his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Tsinghua in 2018 and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024, joined Nvidia’s Nemotron team as a principal research scientist, according to Zhu’s post on X from over the weekend.
Zhu’s LinkedIn profile showed that he has also been an assistant professor at the University of Washington since September 2024.
“We’ll be joining forces on efforts in [AI] model post-training, evaluation, agents, and building better AI infrastructure – with a strong emphasis on collaboration with developers and academia,” Zhu said, adding that the team was committed to open-sourcing its work and sharing it with the world.
Nemotron is a group at Nvidia dedicated to building enterprise-level AI agents, according to the team’s official website. The team’s Nemotron multimodal models power AI agents for sophisticated text and visual reasoning, coding and tool-use capabilities.
Jiao, who received a PhD in electrical, electronics and communications in engineering from Stanford University in 2018 after graduating from Tsinghua with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, said on LinkedIn over the weekend that he joined Nvidia to “help push the frontier of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI).”
AGI and ASI are higher levels of AI that are meant to reach or exceed human intelligence.
“I’m thrilled to be working with amazing colleagues to advance post-training, evaluation, agentic systems and AI infrastructure,” said Jiao, who also works as an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley.
Zhu and Jiao have worked together before, co-launching a start-up called Nexusflow AI in Palo Alto, California between June 2023 and June 2025.
Jiao served as CEO of the firm, which developed an open-source Athene-V2 model that rivalled OpenAI’s GPT4o in terms of performance.
Nvidia’s recruiting of Zhu and Jiao came as Chinese experts were increasingly being recognised as a driving force in advancing generative AI – the technology behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT – with some star researchers in high demand at leading US tech firms.
He Kaiming, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was recently tapped by Google to join the company’s AI research facility DeepMind as a distinguished scientist.
Originally from China’s southern Guangdong province, He graduated from Tsinghua and the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is a highly recognised scientist in the field of computer vision and deep learning.
Meta also reportedly poached at least five Chinese AI researchers from OpenAI, according to reports by The Wall Street Journal and the Information.
Those included Zhai Xiaohua from OpenAI’s Zurich office; as well as Yu Jiahui, Ren Hongyun, Bi Shucao and Zhao Shengjia, key contributors to a slew of OpenAI’s models.
Meta and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours on Sunday.
China was the second-largest source of AI talent in the US in 2023, accounting for 26 per cent of top-tier researchers, just behind American researchers who made up 28 per cent, according to a report by research agency Marco Polo, which is affiliated with think tank the Paulson Institute.
Source: http://scmp.com/
