AI = Asian Intelligence? Chinese talent fuels American AI, but for how long?

The situation could be changing amid suspicion in the US govt towards talent from a rival nation

- Bhagyashree Garekar

AUSTIN, Texas - When Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu and Hongyu Ren jumped ship from OpenAI to Meta's Superintelligence Labs earlier this year, most people gasped at the money involved in the fierce war for talent among Silicon Valley's top artificial intelligence (AI) firms.

The poached researchers were reportedly lured with pay packages running into nine figures to help Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg achieve his mission to "bring personal superintelligence to everyone".

Some observers remarked on their names - all Chinese.

The four researchers are the brains behind some of OpenAI's most sophisticated ChatGPT series of models.

They are part of a pattern: young Chinese scholars with rigorous undergraduate degrees from home who arrive in the US to earn their PhDs and stay on to become the face of American AI.

Mr. Zuckerberg also snagged Apple's Dr. Ruomin Pang, a Shanghai Jiao Tong University graduate with a PhD from Princeton. His compensation will reportedly cross US$200 million (S$256 million) over several years.

To put that in context, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earned US$79 million in 2024.

The Meta team is led by Mr. Alexandr Wang, the founder of Scale AI. Mr. Zuckerberg enticed him by buying up nearly half of his start-up for US$14.3 billion in a deal that valued Mr. Wang's personal stake at US$5 billion and made him the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 26. A dropout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is the US-born son of Chinese immigrants.

Meta's superintelligence corps is made up mostly of immigrants, Mr. Damien Ma, the author of the most widely cited study of global AI talent, told The Sunday Times.

"I think it's something like 75 percent foreign-born talent, with the majority of them being of Chinese origin," said Mr. Ma, the founder of MacroPolo, a think-tank at Paulson Institute.