‘I have to do it’: Why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China

"Left the US" could also have been written as "Returned to his country of birth", but that doesn't play to the fake arms race vibes.

Good article. Will finish it later but it seems pretty neutral and relevant painting both the US and China's history and recent actions. Many interesting parts, guy knows LLMs are not the way to AGI, wonder how much more the American LLM bubble can hold. From what I read, he seems like a real, brilliant scientist, driven by wanting to understand consciousness, but also an Oppenheimer type.

The leads buried pretty deep:

It was in summer 2020, in the early months of Covid, Zhu says, that he made the decision to leave the US. He cited his disaffection with the direction of the AI community and the hothouse of American politics – both its leftwing brand of campus progressivism and the Trump-era national security crusades. There was also a personal factor. His younger daughter, Zhu Yi, is a figure skater who was recruited in 2018 to compete for China in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics

In general he seems more angry at the direction silicon valley ai is going rather then how US politics are going. He thinks larger more traditional explainable statistical models are the way forward as opposed to the black box neural networks and transformers that power llms and most other models in this recent wave.

China is giving him hundreds of millions in grants to pursue those theories, whereas silicon valley vcs probably won't give him a dime unless it's got an llm in it and US research grants are drying up in general but especially to Chinese professors.