Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee (traditional Chinese: 李開復; simplified Chinese: 李开复; pinyin: Lǐ Kāifù; born December 3, 1961) is a Taiwanese computer scientist, investor, and author. He was the founding director of Microsoft Research China, later Microsoft Research Asia, serving from 1998 to 2000, and served as president of Google China 2005 to 2009.

In 2009, Lee founded the venture capital firm Innovation Works, later renamed Sinovation Ventures. In 2023, he founded 01.AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company.

Lee is the author of AI Superpowers (2018) and AI 2041 (with Chen Qiufan, 2021). He has served as co‑chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council and was named to TIME's 2023 list of the 100 most influential people in AI.

Lee was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He is the son of Li Tianmin, a legislator and historian from Sichuan, China. Lee has detailed his personal life and career history in his autobiography in both Chinese and English, Making a World of Difference, published in October 2011.

In 1973, Lee immigrated to the United States and attended Oak Ridge High School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He received a Bachelor of Science, summa cum laude, with a major in computer science from Columbia University in 1983. He then earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988.

A Taiwanese national by birth, Lee also acquired U.S. citizenship through naturalization while young. He voluntarily relinquished his U.S. citizenship in 2011 and retained only his Taiwanese nationality, citing the reason as wanting to "get back to [his] roots" as he aged.

At Carnegie Mellon, Lee worked on topics in machine learning and pattern recognition. In 1986, he and Sanjoy Mahajan developed Bill, a Bayesian learning-based system for playing the board game Othello that won the US national tournament of computer players in 1989. In 1988, he completed his doctoral dissertation on Sphinx, a large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system that drew wide notice in the field.

Lee has written two books on speech recognition and more than 60 papers in computer science. His doctoral dissertation was published in 1988 as a Kluwer monograph, Automatic Speech Recognition: The Development of the Sphinx Recognition System (ISBN 0898382963). Together with Alex Waibel, another Carnegie Mellon researcher, Lee edited Readings in Speech Recognition (1990, ISBN 1-55860-124-4).

After two years as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon, Lee joined Apple Computer in 1990 as a principal research scientist. While at Apple (1990–1996), he headed R&D groups responsible for Apple Bandai Pippin, PlainTalk, Casper (speech interface), and GalaTea (text to speech system) for Mac Computers.

Lee moved to Silicon Graphics in 1996 and spent a year as the Vice President of its Web Products division, and another year as president of its multimedia software division, Cosmo Software.

In 1998, Lee moved to Microsoft and went to Beijing, China where he played a key role in establishing the Microsoft Research (MSR) division there. MSR China later became known as Microsoft Research Asia, regarded as one of the best computer science research labs in the world. Lee returned to the United States in 2000 and was promoted to corporate vice president of interactive services division at Microsoft from 2000 to 2005.

Chairman World Economic Forum's Global AI Council

Honorary Doctorate Degree, Carnegie Mellon University

Honorary Doctorate Degree, City University of Hong Kong

Kai-Fu Lee (September 25, 2018). AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 9781328546395. OCLC 1035622189.

Be Your Personal Best (《做最好的自己》, published September 2005, People's Publishing House)

Making A World of Difference - Kai-Fu Lee Biography (《世界因你而不同》, published September 2009, China CITIC Press)

Seeing Life Through Death (《向死而生》, published July 2015, by China CITIC Press)

A Walk Into The Future (《与未来同行》, published October 2006, People's Publishing House)

Lee posted on Weibo on September 5, 2013, that he had been diagnosed with lymphoma. In December 2018, Lee spoke at the End Well Symposium on end of life in San Francisco, stating: "I was a maniacal workaholic. That workaholism ended abruptly about five years ago, when I was diagnosed with Stage IV lymphoma."