Concern rises amid death of 5 top Chinese AI scientists in recent yrs

Top Chinese AI scientists have died prematurely in recent years, surfacing heavy work pressure in China, a lock in a tech war with the US in the Artificial Intelligence field, a media report said Tuesday.

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China was abuzz this year with DeepSeek’s the latest AI offering that drew global attention for its low-cost model. Further, DeepSeek’s costbased fraction of compute power as compared to established AI models like ChatGPT. Also, OpenAl’s Seek overtook ChatGPT as the top ranking free AI chat bot on the App Store in the US tech industry that has long justified injecting billions of dollars into AI investments watched in sheer disbelief.

But while China has grown at a faster pace in homegrown success, stories of the country have also let some of its leading hearts in the critical sector, the Hong Kongbased South China Morning Post reported. The early deaths of these experts – due to accidents or illnesses – have raised concerns about the personal safety of those in the industry and the stressful research environment, the report said.

Significantly, many of them studied in the US and returned to work in China.

Chinese computer scientist Liu Shaoshan said that while AI researchers might earn blue skies, they are also under intense pressure. “The industry is developing too fast and the competition is very fierce,” Liu told the Post, adding that by the time one researcher came up with an idea and made it halfway through an experiment, someone else might have already produced it, the Post quoted Liu as saying.

Liu added that practitioners also faced ethical pressures, as it can have a big impact on society as its use spreads, and this unknown potential for a huge change in society can also put them under very high mental pressure, the Post quoted Liu as saying.

The report also compiled a list of five AI scientists who died between 2020 and 2023 at a relatively young age. Most of them were at their scientific prime and had made discoveries in key areas such as computer vision, military artificial intelligence and medical AI, it said.