The Guardian recently published a very lengthy and excellent article on Why One of the World’s Most Brilliant AI Scientists Left the U.S. for China. It’s the best AI-related article I’ve read all year.

The short version is that Zhu, a tenured professor of AI vision at UCLA, left in 2020 to return to China (where he spent the first two decades of his life) to lead AI efforts there.

His motivations appear to be multiple. One is general dissatisfaction with the field of vision AI research, which historically was heavily influenced by the Harvard-Brown school (of which he played a large role), focused more on statistics, but which has been overtaken by a turn towards transformers and deep neural nets similar to those used by LLMs like ChatGPT.

A second appears to be familial. His daughter, Zhu Yi, is a prominent figure skater who in 2018 won the U.S. national novice title before renouncing her U.S. citizenship and training in China, which she represented in the 2022 Olympic Games. She is on track to do so again in 2026 and has millions of dollars in state funding to support her training.

Zhu himself was offered two prominent academic positions in China and large funding to lead future A.I. efforts, which would appeal to any academic, separate from the U.S.-China considerations.

And a final potential motivation raised in the article is the rising anti-China sentiment in parts of the United States. In 2020, Donald Trump was repeatedly referring to COVID-19 as the “kung flu,” and hate crimes against Chinese people had soared. As a result, Zhu left in relative secrecy, not notifying anyone of his intentions until he landed in China in August of 2020.

So what to make of all this? AI research is now seen as a crucial economic, political, and increasingly military area for countries, especially the U.S. and China. While China is investing in people and technologies, the U.S. appears to be going in the other direction, actively discouraging the best and the brightest from around the world from studying here and clamping down on the funding needed to make future advancements.

We only have to look back in history to the Manhattan Project 80 years ago to see how important foreign-born scientists have been to the United States. Many of the top theoretical physicists and chemists—Einstein, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, James Franck, Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, Klaus Fuchs, and others—were foreign-born and/or refugees from Europe.