WSJ Deep Dive: Behind the Rise of Chinese AI, a Tsinghua Talent Pipeline

Dynamic Insight: Beating AI Newsletter, when the Wall Street Journal reviewed China's AI rise, it focused on a long-standing talent chain originating from Tsinghua University.

Zhipu Founder Tang Jie and Moon's Dark Side Founder Yang Zhilin, who were once student and mentor in a Tsinghua lab over a decade ago. Tang Jie once supervised Yang Zhilin's research on machine learning, and even recommended him for Tsinghua's highest academic award. Today, the two have respectively founded Zhipu and Moon's Dark Side, becoming key figures in China's AI model startup wave.

The stories of these individuals did not begin with the recent success of DeepSeek. Tang Jie has been researching machine learning for about 25 years. Over the past two decades, Chinese universities have cultivated a group of computer talents, accumulated a large amount of data and engineering experience in the Internet era. Subsequently, some researchers joined U.S. tech companies, then returned to China to start businesses, bridging academic research, engineering capabilities, and commercialization.

Tang Jie has long focused on AGI. Following the release of GPT-3, he expressed his desire to build a machine that can "think like a human." In 2019, he commercialized the Tsinghua lab's technology and founded Zhipu, subsequently betting heavily on large models.

Chinese AI companies have pursued a different path from U.S. tech giants. Due to chip and funding limitations, they find it challenging to replicate the high-investment path of OpenAI and Anthropic, instead seeking breakthroughs in algorithm efficiency, open source, and engineering optimization. DeepSeek's MLA, MoE, and other technologies are representative of this "achieving higher efficiency with fewer resources" approach.

Over the past few years, China's AI competition has appeared to be a model race on the surface but is actually the realization of talent accumulation. Research that was once confined to laboratories is now entering the industry through a group of startups.