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China's biggest tech corporations are constructing artificial intelligence teams in Silicon Valley and searching for to rent top U.S. talent, at the same time as Washington seeks to curb the country's development of cutting-edge technology.
Alibaba, ByteDance and Meituan have expanded their offices in California in recent months and sought to poach employees from rival U.S. corporations that would help them gain ground within the race for profits through generative AI.
The move comes despite U.S. efforts to obstruct their work. Chinese corporations have been hit by a US ban on exporting the best quality Nvidia AI chips, that are crucial for developing AI models.
There are currently no restrictions on U.S.-based corporations affiliated with or owned by Chinese technology corporations accessing high-end AI chips through U.S. data centers.
However, the Commerce Department in January proposed introducing a rule that will require cloud providers to confirm the identities of users who train AI models and report their activities.
Alibaba is recruiting an AI team in Sunnyvale, California's San Francisco Bay Area, and has reached out to engineers, product managers and AI researchers who’ve worked at OpenAI and the biggest U.S. tech corporations, in keeping with three people conversant in the matter.
China's largest e-commerce group has posted job advertisements on LinkedIn for an applied scientist, machine learning engineer and product marketing manager within the United States. The team will give attention to Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group's AI-powered search engine Accio for merchants, one other person added.
An Alibaba recruiter emailed tech employees within the U.S. that the Chinese e-commerce company planned to spin off its California AI team right into a separate startup, in keeping with two people conversant in the matter. Alibaba didn’t reply to a request for comment.
A former researcher at OpenAI said they were bombarded with messages from Chinese tech corporations – including inquiries from food delivery platforms Meituan and Alibaba – trying to search out out more details about their experiences at the corporate and offer them job offers.
Meituan has been expanding its team in California in recent months after executives became concerned that the corporate was falling behind in AI, in keeping with two people conversant in the matter.
CEO Wang
Some team members split their time between the Bay Area and Beijing, the person added. Chinese media site 36Kr first reported that Wang was in control of a brand new AI unit at Meituan. Meituan didn’t reply to a request for comment.
TikTok owner ByteDance has probably the most established AI presence in California, with multiple teams working on different projects. A research team is specializing in integrating AI features into TikTok. A gaggle of researchers can also be working on its large-scale Doubao language model with colleagues in China and Singapore, in keeping with several people conversant in the matter.
The California-based staff reports to Zhu Wenjia, who’s answerable for model development and is based in Beijing. Previously, he led the product and technology department at TikTok. ByteDance didn’t reply to a comment.
Smaller Chinese AI startups have also gained a foothold within the US, recruiting engineers with experience at leading research labs and firms within the region.
Wu Yuxin, one in all the co-founders of Moonshot AI, relies in San Francisco, in keeping with his LinkedIn profile. He previously worked at Meta, Cruise after which in multimodal research at Google Brain before co-founding Beijing-based Unicorn.
He is currently working on large multimodal models at Moonshot, which owns a preferred AI chatbot called Kimi that has gained traction in China, in keeping with people conversant in the matter and its website. Moonshot didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Baidu, which runs China's largest search engine, previously operated one in all Silicon Valley's leading AI research labs, employing top scientists and engineers working on areas comparable to speech recognition and autonomous driving.
At its peak in 2017, Baidu employed several hundred people at its U.S. R&D center, with high-profile executives comparable to Adam Coates and Andrew Ng holding senior positions.
An executive exodus on account of internal conflicts at the corporate and deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing led Baidu to significantly cut back its operations there, in keeping with several people conversant in the matter.
