A 75-Year-Old Harvard Grad Is Propelling China's AI Ambitions
Andrew Yao has influenced some of the biggest Chinese startups, informed government policy and molded a generation of academics.
At a time when the US and China are divided on everything from economics to human rights, artificial intelligence is still a point of particular friction. With the potential to revolutionize everything from food production and health care to financial markets and surveillance, it’s a technology that sparks both optimism and paranoia.
One of the field’s most influential figures is Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, whose education and professional life have straddled the world’s two biggest economies. China-born and Harvard-trained, Yao is his country’s only recipient of the Turing Award, computer science’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize. After almost 40 years in the US, he returned to China in 2004. Now he teaches a prestigious yet little-known university class that has shaped some of the country’s biggest AI startups, informed government policy and molded a generation of academics.