Nvidia Enlists Two Chinese AI Experts to Boost Research

US chip giant Nvidia has hired two prominent artificial intelligence (AI) experts who hail from China, underscoring the rising global recognition of talent from the mainland and their key contributions to the field’s advancement.

Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao, both alumni of China’s Tsinghua University, announced on their respective social media accounts that they have joined Nvidia, sharing photos of themselves with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of the company.

Zhu, who received his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Tsinghua in 2018 and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024, joined Nvidia’s Nemotron team as a principal research scientist. According to Zhu’s post on X, he will be focusing on AI model post-training, evaluation, agents, and building better AI infrastructure, with a strong emphasis on collaboration with developers and academia.

Zhu’s LinkedIn profile shows that he has also been an assistant professor at the University of Washington since September 2024. “We’ll be joining forces on efforts in AI model post-training, evaluation, agents, and building better AI infrastructure – with a strong emphasis on collaboration with developers and academia,” Zhu said, adding that the team is committed to open-sourcing its work and sharing it with the world.

Nemotron is a group at Nvidia dedicated to building enterprise-level AI agents. The team’s Nemotron multimodal models power AI agents for sophisticated text and visual reasoning, coding, and tool-use capabilities.

Jiao, who received a PhD in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering from Stanford University in 2018 after graduating from Tsinghua with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, announced on LinkedIn that he has joined Nvidia to “help push the frontier of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI).”

This move by Nvidia highlights the company’s commitment to leveraging top-tier talent to advance AI research and development. It also reflects the growing importance of Chinese AI experts in the global tech landscape, as their contributions continue to shape the future of technology.