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

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

, 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 Straits Times.

“I think it’s something like 75 per cent 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. 

Somebody put it well, he said in a social media post: “AI = Asian Intelligence”.

The US innovates, China scales and Europe regulates, Mr Ma noted in the study published in March 2024, based on 2022 data.

As countries and companies jostle over a limited pool of top-flight AI talent, the US remains the top destination because it has long offered the chance to make a mark at the cutting edge of the industry. 

The world’s elite AI talent – the top 2 per cent of AI researchers – was concentrated in the US, which has 57 per cent of them, compared with China’s 12 per cent in 2022, Mr Ma’s research showed.

But China is now the biggest producer of AI talent, generating almost half of the world’s top 20 per cent of AI researchers in 2022. It produced less than a third in 2019, the reference year for the study.

Mr Ma’s study defined as elite those researchers whose papers were accepted for oral presentations at NeurIPS, one of the most prestigious and selective machine learning conferences.

In 2019, 59 per cent of the top 20 per cent of the world’s AI researchers worked in US companies, compared with 11 per cent in Chinese companies. By 2022, the US share shrank to 42 per cent while the Chinese share had grown to 28 per cent.

More recent data is not available to show exactly how the AI talent is flowing amid the US-China tug of war for AI supremacy.

“There’s anecdotal data, but it’s hard to really make sense of it,” Mr Ma added. “The fact remains that US AI talent is mainly foreign-born talent, Chinese or otherwise. That reality isn’t going to change any time soon.” 

A paper on AI talent released in January 2025 by the Biden White House noted that about half of AI-relevant master’s degrees and doctorates awarded in the US are earned by non-US citizens. Almost 80 per cent of them choose to stay back in the US.

But this could be changing, with a surging suspicion in the US government towards talent from a rival nation. An AI student from China now has to contend with the threat of visa revocations and grant freezes.

Meanwhile, the Chinese AI industry has caught up with the US. National pride and state funding are a draw for the Chinese to return to China, said Ms Selina Xu, a New York-based Singaporean tech analyst who specialises in China and AI.

It is a different game now for a Chinese undergrad with sights set on doctoral studies or a student wondering where to work after the PhD.

“The Chinese frontier labs are now as competitive as (those in) the US in terms of the research you can be doing,” said Ms Xu.

“The compensation has crept up as well, even though it’s nowhere near the crazy pay packages in the US. But then the taxes and the cost of living are different too. I’ve seen a lot of people decide they would rather join a Chinese moonshot than stay on and work at Google, for instance.”

The disruption in travel to the US during the Covid-19 pandemic and the targeting of Chinese-origin researchers during US President Donald Trump’s first term changed the landscape. 

Under the China Initiative programme launched in 2018, the Trump administration tried to combat the theft of US technology. It led to accusations of racial profiling, stigmatisation and slowed scientific collaboration. The Biden administration ended the programme in 2022 but kept the visa restrictions on Chinese researchers. 

“Those factors had already been compounding, and then came a series of announcements by the Trump administration this year, attacking the universities and cutting funding,” said Ms Xu.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on May 28 that the administration

, including those with connections to the Communist Party of China or those studying in critical fields. 

The government has also paused or frozen billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts as it cracks down on liberal universities. 

Ms Xu said the options have become starker for the Chinese AI researcher as China has become much more attractive, thanks to the funding available. “The fact that you’re Chinese might make you susceptible to accusations of not being loyal to the US,” she said. 

Dr Andrew Ng, a British-American AI guru who studied in Singapore’s Raffles Institution in the 1990s, has spoken of students being afraid to travel for fear of being stranded.

“I have spoken with international students who are terrified that their visas may be cancelled arbitrarily,” he said in a social media post in June. 

“One recently agonised about whether to attend an international conference to present a research paper because they were worried about being unable to return. 

“With great sadness, they cancelled their trip.”