In 2022, another batch of AI big cows left from the big factory

Picture source @Vision China

Titanium Media Note: This article comes from the WeChat public account InfoQ, the author | Liu Yan, and Titanium Media is authorized to publish.

Domestically: Wang Gang, the head of the autonomous driving laboratory of DAMO Academy, resigned to start a business

In January 2022, according to Tech Planet, Wang Gang, vice president of Alibaba and head of the autonomous driving laboratory of Dharma Academy, resigned. According to people familiar with the matter, after Wang Gang resigns, he will choose to start a business in the field of cleaning robots and has already obtained financing.

Ali expressed his gratitude to Wang Gang for his contribution to the unmanned driving technology of DAMO Academy, and wished Wang Gang well.

According to public information, Wang Gang was a tenured professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. In 2017, he joined Ali and successively served as the chief scientist of the artificial intelligence laboratory, the head of the automatic driving laboratory of the Bodhidharma Academy, the vice president of Alibaba Group, and the head of the automatic driving laboratory of the Bodhidharma Academy.

During his tenure as the chief scientist of the Ali Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Wang Gang was the first-generation technical director of Tmall Genie. The Tmall Genie X1 released in July 2017 applied a number of Wang Gang’s research results.

In 2017, Wang Gang became the head of the autonomous driving laboratory of Ali Dharma Academy. In September 2021, Wang Gang announced that the L4 self-driving product developed by Dharma Institute and the terminal logistics unmanned vehicle “Little Man Donkey” have landed in 22 provinces across the country, with a cumulative delivery order of over 1 million orders, serving more than 200,000 people. Delivered by courier. And left the development goal for the next 3 years – after 3 years, the size of the small donkey fleet will reach 10,000 vehicles, with an average daily delivery of 1 million parcels. Wang Gang said that the research and development of the “Da Man Donkey”, an unmanned truck for public roads, has also started. This is Wang Gang’s first analysis of Alibaba’s autonomous driving strategic layout.

In 2017, the Dharma Institute was established, and the autonomous driving laboratory took on the task of integrating and unifying the autonomous driving technology of the Ali Group. Wang Gang led a team to form a research and development force, and began to explore application-oriented technologies. Wang Gang emphasized that Ali will continue to invest in autonomous driving for a long time.

Due to disagreements with the company, Cambrian CTO Liang Jun resigned

On the evening of March 14, 2022, Cambrian issued an announcement stating that Mr. Liang Jun, a core technician, notified the company to terminate the labor contract due to differences with the company. In fact, as early as mid-January, Liang Jun had already submitted a resignation application to the company.

According to the “Labor Contract” signed by Liang Jun and the company and the relevant provisions of the “Labor Contract Law”, the company has recently gone through the relevant resignation procedures for him; after resignation, Mr. Liang Jun will no longer hold any position in the company.

According to Cambrian, Liang Jun’s resignation will have a certain impact on the company’s R&D management. The company has established a complete research and development system, formed a professional research and development team, and reserved a wealth of patented technologies. Liang Jun’s resignation will not affect the company’s technological innovation, and will not have a major adverse impact on the company’s overall research and development strength.

According to public information, Liang Jun was born in 1976 and has a master’s degree in communication and information systems from the University of Science and Technology of China. From 2000 to 2003, he worked in the Beijing Research Institute of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. as an engineer. From 2003 to 2017, worked in the Basic Business Department of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and Shenzhen Hisilicon Semiconductor Co., Ltd., and served as engineer, senior engineer, chief engineer, technical expert, and senior technical expert. Liang Jun joined Cambrian in 2017. Before leaving the company, he was mainly engaged in R&D management. He served as the deputy general manager and chief technology officer of the company and was one of the company’s core technical personnel.

Jin Rong, vice president of Alibaba and vice president of DAMO Academy, resigns

After Wang Gang, another sweeping monk from the Bodhidharma Academy resigned.

In May 2022, according to Tech Planet, Jin Rong, vice president of Alibaba and vice president of Dharma Institute, resigned.

In 2014, Rong Jin joined Alibaba and was in charge of the iDST US R&D center established by Ali in Silicon Valley, USA. He has been paying attention to statistical machine learning for a long time, focusing on big data analysis and its application in information retrieval, e-commerce and other fields. The specific research and development products include the “Pailitao” function in the mobile phone Taobao App. Later, he served as the vice president of Bodhidharma Academy, responsible for the field of machine intelligence research, known as the “super brain”.

Jin Rong graduated from Tianjin University with a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree from Peking University, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. He was a tenured professor at Michigan State University, chairman of NIPS and SIGIR conferences, a member of KDD and other committees, and a Career Award from the National Science Foundation. Long-term focus on statistical machine learning, focusing on big data analysis and its application in information retrieval, e-commerce and other fields.

Byte Intelligent Voice Technology Engineer Mei Xiao resigned

In May 2022, Mei Xiao, a Byte Smart voice technical engineer, resigned. In 2018, Mei Xiao joined Bytedance. Mei Xiao is mainly responsible for artificial intelligence-related data production and business strategy formulation in Byte’s AI-lab intelligent voice department, mainly in the direction of speech synthesis technology.

According to public information, Mei Xiao has more than ten years of experience in the field of speech synthesis, understands the application of linguistics in this technology, and technical solutions to solve business problems. After graduating from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mei Xiao worked as a senior researcher at Nuance, an authoritative supplier in the field of image and speech technology, and then joined Tencent in 2016 as a senior engineer, responsible for the development of the speech synthesis language library and the synthesis algorithm. Evaluation, etc. In terms of business, Mei Xiao’s team serves as a middle office to provide speech synthesis technical support for many businesses, including the voices of Lu Bu, Liu Bei, and Sun Shangxiang of the King of Glory robot.

Huawei’s self-driving CTO Chen Yilun resigns to join Zhang Yaqin’s team

On July 13 last year, Tsinghua University Intelligent Industry Research Institute (AIR) announced that Chen Yilun joined Zhang Yaqin’s team as the chief expert in the direction of intelligent robots at Tsinghua University Intelligent Industry Research Institute (AIR).

Chen Yilun, graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering of the University of Michigan with a Ph.D., and graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University with a bachelor’s and master’s degree. Before joining AIR, Chen Yilun served as the CTO and chief scientist of the automatic driving system of Huawei’s smart car solution division. He was responsible for the design of Huawei’s high-level automatic driving technology solutions. Full-stack research and development; also served as chief engineer of DJI Machine Vision, vice president of Jingyan Intelligent Technology, technical expert and project team leader of Eaton Corporation.

Dr. Xiao Lihua, former Vice President of Alibaba Group and Dean of Alibaba Cloud Research Institute, resigned to start a business

In May last year, Dr. Xiao Lihua (nickname “Xiao Bo”), former vice president of Alibaba Group, president of Alibaba Cloud’s new retail division, and director of Alibaba Cloud Research Institute, resigned and founded Zhixingheyi Technology Co., Ltd.

It is reported that the company provides one-stop digital intelligence transformation services for enterprises, including consulting + software + operation and other services, that is, to help enterprises form a closed loop of strategic transformation→business restructuring→organizational upgrading→IT/DT construction→digital intelligence operation , able to provide an end-to-end solution.

During more than 4 years in Ali, Xiao Lihua has been in charge of the group’s strategic key customer A100, Tmall empowering merchants’ new retail (project total PM), Alibaba Cloud empowering merchants’ digital intelligence transformation, government and enterprise full-link digital intelligence in various industries transformation theory and practice.

Yang Hongxia, technical director of pre-training large model M6 of Dharma Institute, resigned

In October 2022, according to media reports, Yang Hongxia, the leader of the large-scale model of the Ali Dharma Institute, resigned in early September.

Dr. Yang Hongxia is the technical director of the ultra-large-scale multi-modal pre-training model M6. The M6 ​​large model focuses on multi-modality and multi-task capabilities, and its goal is to create a world-leading general-purpose artificial intelligence large-scale model.

In March 2021, DAMO Academy released the first domestic multi-modal large model M6 with 100 billion parameters, which attracted overseas attention. Jack Clark, former policy director of OpenAI, publicly commented: “The scale and design of this model are amazing. This looks like a manifestation of the gradual development and growth of many Chinese AI research organizations.”

According to reports, Yang Hongxia’s resignation is due to personal and family reasons. According to the Tech Planet report, Yang Hongxia’s resignation this time is considered to be the adjustment of some commercial projects that are difficult to implement by Dharma Institute. According to an Alibaba Cloud insider, “Many projects of Dharma Institute look great from a distance, but they are difficult to implement in close quarters.” Although both are in cloud and technology, the projects of Dharma Institute are far away from business, production and research. , and are rarely sold together with cloud services. Therefore, the application and commercialization degree of each project of Dharma Academy is a mystery in many cases.

Previously, Ali has always stressed that there is no need for Bodhidharma Institute to make profits. However, in 2022, Internet companies will generally reduce costs and increase efficiency, and Dharma Institute has also made many adjustments.

Yang Hongxia is an outstanding artificial intelligence scientist in the field of AI. According to the data, Yang Hongxia graduated from Nankai University in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in statistics. She then went to the Department of Statistical Science of Duke University to study for a Ph.D. under the tutelage of Professor David Dunson. Yang Hongxia has more than 40 top-level papers. Former IBM Watson researcher, Yahoo! Chief Data Scientist, etc. She has led the team to win the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference’s highest award, the Super AI Leader (SAIL Award), won the honor of Forbes China’s Top 50 Women in Science and Technology in 2022, and won the second prize of the 2020 National Science and Technology Progress Award prize.

Wang Yilun, the person in charge of the intelligent driving AI algorithm of Li Auto and the chief scientist of AI, resigned

In October last year, Wang Yilun, the person in charge of the intelligent driving AI algorithm of Li Auto and the chief scientist of AI, resigned. After resignation, Wang Yilun may participate in entrepreneurship. As soon as the news came out, the person in charge of Ideal Auto said, “This is a normal flow of people.”

During the ideal period, Wang Yilun was mainly responsible for the research and development of AI algorithms such as intelligent driving perception and maps. According to 36 Krypton reports, a source said that it was related to too much pressure on internal research and development. The number of Li Auto’s self-driving team is half that of Xiaopeng, and CEO Li Xiang’s expansion pace is relatively conservative. Another person who is close to the ideal said that the reason for Wang Yilun’s resignation may also be that the ideal autopilot team is difficult to expand, and insufficient job indicators have not been approved due to cost considerations.

Wang Yilun once said in an interview that ideally, work has almost become the whole of life. Under high-intensity overtime work, he gained 20 catties in one year. Ideal CEO Li Xiang also said frankly: In Ideal, it is normal for everyone to work until 12 o’clock in the evening, especially the autonomous driving team, which works on most Saturdays and Sundays.

overseas

The situation abroad is not optimistic either.

The head of Tesla’s AI and self-driving team leaves

On July 13 last year, Andrej Karpathy, head of Tesla’s artificial intelligence and head of the company’s autopilot team, announced his departure on Twitter.

Karpathy tweeted: “For the past 5 years, as Tesla worked hard towards its goals, it was a difficult decision to say goodbye. The Autopilot system has been From the original lane keeping assist function to city street driving assistance, I hope that more talents will join the Autopilot team in the future to continue this momentum. Karpathy added that he has no plans for the next step and hopes to spend more time” Revisiting my longstanding passion for working in artificial intelligence, open source, and educational technology.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded on Twitter, thanking Karpathy for his work at the company.

Before joining Tesla in 2017, Karpathy was an AI scientist at OpenAI, has an extensive background in AI-related fields, and is the creator of one of Stanford University’s most respected deep learning courses. After Musk acquired OpenAI, Karpathy logically entered Tesla.

Since joining Tesla, Karpathy has managed a team of senior machine learning scientists and engineers focused on building computer vision systems to power Autopilot’s advanced driver assistance system, which is consistent with his previous papers and his work at OpenAI. The overlap of work is high.

Karpathy’s five years at Tesla was also the “cornerstone era” when Tesla popularized the word “artificial intelligence” from automobiles to the general field.

It is speculated that Karpathy’s departure may be due to the delayed delivery of Tesla’s promised fully self-driving (FSD) feature set over the years, and the frequent occurrence of Autopilot-related traffic accidents.

Several AI executives at Meta have left, and the AI ​​​​team has undergone reorganization

Since the beginning of this year, a number of Meta executives have left.

In April, Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer left. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who has been with Meta for 14 years, announced on June 1 that she will be leaving this fall. A day after Sheryl Sandberg announced his departure, Meta’s vice president of artificial intelligence, Jerome Pesenti, also announced his resignation. Immediately afterwards, David Mortenson, a senior engineering director responsible for data centers and core infrastructure who had worked at Meta for 11 years, also announced his imminent departure. His direct report, Santosh Janardhan, currently vice president of engineering, will take over the role at a later date.

Last year, Meta’s artificial intelligence team also underwent a large-scale reorganization, including: a responsible AI organization will join the social impact team (Social Impact team); the product team will be responsible for protecting platform users, improving recommendations, making content more relevant, and improving advertising and commercial services, which will move to the product engineering team; the AI4AR team will join Reality Labs’ XR team; and the AI ​​research team FAIR will become a new pillar of Reality Labs Research. Its mission and charter to advance fundamental breakthroughs in AI through research excellence, open science, and broad collaboration will remain the same. The FAIR team will continue to have a strong leadership team including Joelle Pineau, Antoine Bordes and Yann LeCun.

Google’s 26-bit AI leader leaves

According to a survey by Business Insider, in the past year, 26 AI experts have left Alphabet alone, including subsidiaries Google and DeepMind.

There are a lot of AI experts who left and started their own companies.

For example, Adept AI is a start-up company established in April 2022. This start-up company focuses on creating a robot based on the same core technology as text generation tools. Its CEO, CTO and chief scientist are all from Google. Adept AI’s ECO David Luan is the former vice president of engineering at OpenAI California Laboratory. He joined Google Brain, one of the authors of GPT-2 and PaLM papers, and participated in part of the work of GPT-3; Ashish Vaswani is the chief scientist of Adept AI. Niki Parmar is Adept AI CTO and former Google Brain researcher.

Mustafa Suleyman, vice president of artificial intelligence products and policy at Google, and a founding member of DeepMind artificial intelligence laboratory, founded Inflection AI, a startup company in the field of general modeling, as its CEO and co-founder after leaving. The company raised $225 million last May. It is reported that at least four Google AI employees joined Inflexion AI last year.

Last year, many DeepMind experts left to join start-ups. For example, last January, Martin Schmid, Matej Moravcik and Rudolf Kadlec left DeepMind to found EquiLibre Technologies, an AI startup focused on stocks and cryptocurrencies. All three are developers of DeepMind’s poker AI DeepStack; Rudolf Kadlec, a former senior researcher at DeepMind and co-author of Player of Games, is currently the CTO and co-founder of EquiLibre Technologies.

In recent years, it has gradually become a trend for scientists to leave major Internet companies. Some of them change jobs and continue to take root in the industry, some choose to embark on the road of entrepreneurship, and some return to academia from the industry…

This wave of exodus of scientists will undoubtedly have a certain impact on the development of large factories and the Internet. For large factories, they may have to face the challenge of the loss of talents, but from another perspective, big factories have also sent many talents to the industry. , these top AI talents are still an important force to promote AI innovation. However, it will take time to evaluate the impact geometry.