Chinese tech groups build AI teams in Silicon Valley

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China’s biggest technology groups are building artificial intelligence teams in Silicon Valley, seeking to hire top US talent despite Washington’s efforts to curb the country’s development of the cutting-edge technology.

Alibaba, ByteDance and Meituan have been expanding their offices in California in recent months, seeking to poach staff from rival US groups who could help them make up ground in the race to profit from generative AI.

The push comes despite US efforts to stymie their work. Chinese groups have been hit by a US ban on exports of the highest-end Nvidia AI chips, which are crucial for developing AI models.

There are currently no restrictions on US-based entities related to or owned by Chinese tech companies accessing high-end AI chips through data centres located in the US.

However, the Department of Commerce proposed introducing a rule in January that cloud providers have to verify the identity of users training AI models and report their activities.

Alibaba is recruiting an AI team in Sunnyvale in California’s San Francisco Bay Area and has approached engineers, product managers and AI researchers who have worked at OpenAI and the biggest US tech groups, according to three people familiar with the matter.

China’s biggest ecommerce group has posted recruitment advertisements on LinkedIn for an applied scientist, machine-learning engineer and product marketing manager in the US. The team will focus on Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group’s AI-powered search engine Accio for merchants, another person added.

One Alibaba recruiter emailed tech workers in the US saying the Chinese ecommerce company planned to spin off the Californian AI team into a separate start-up, according to two people familiar with the matter. Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment.

One former researcher at OpenAI said they had been bombarded with messages from Chinese tech companies — including approaches from food delivery platform Meituan and Alibaba — trying to learn more information about their experience at the company as well as offering job opportunities.

In the past few months, Meituan has been building out its team in California after executives grew alarmed that it was falling behind on AI, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Chief executive Wang Xing has tapped co-founder Wang Huiwen to return to the company to lead a new generative AI team called GN06, which is exploring AI-related opportunities, including menu translation features and AI companions, according to one of the people.

Some team members are splitting their time between the Bay Area and Beijing, the person added. Chinese media site 36Kr first reported news that Wang was in charge of a new AI unit in Meituan. Meituan did not respond to a request for comment.

TikTok owner ByteDance has the most established AI footprint in California, with multiple teams working on different projects. One research team is focused on integrating AI features into TikTok. It also has a group of researchers working on its Doubao large language model, alongside colleagues in China and Singapore, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

California-based employees report to Zhu Wenjia, who is in charge of model development and is primarily based in Beijing. He previously led product and engineering at TikTok. ByteDance did not respond to a comment.

Smaller Chinese AI start-ups have also established a footprint in the US, recruiting engineers with experience working at leading research laboratories and companies in the area.

Wu Yuxin, one of the co-founders of Moonshot AI, is based in San Francisco, according to his LinkedIn profile. He previously worked at Meta, Cruise and then on multi-modal research at Google Brain, before co-founding the Beijing-based unicorn.

He is now working on large multimodal models at Moonshot, which owns a popular AI chatbot called Kimi that has gained traction in China, according to people familiar with the matter and his website. Moonshot did not respond to a request for comment.

Baidu, which operates China’s biggest search engine, used to run one of the leading AI research labs in Silicon Valley, employing top scientists and engineers working on areas including speech recognition and autonomous driving.

At its peak in 2017, Baidu employed several hundred people at the US research and development centre, with high-profile leaders including Adam Coates and Andrew Ng holding leadership positions.

An exodus of leading staff due to internal conflict at the company and deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing prompted Baidu to significantly reduce its operation there, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.