李开复Kai-Fu Lee

Born 1961 in Taipei, Taiwan. Grew up in Tennessee, USA. Earned a BS in Computer Science from Columbia University (1983), then a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (1988), where his thesis on speaker-independent continuous speech recognition using Hidden Markov Models was named the 'Most Important Innovation' by BusinessWeek. Career at the intersection of industry and China: Apple (1990-1996, led speech recognition), SGI VP, Microsoft VP (founded Microsoft Research China in Beijing, 1998). Became President of Google China (2005-2009), overseeing Google's expansion in China. Founded Sinovation Ventures (2009), one of China's top AI-focused VC firms. In 2023, founded 01.AI to build open-source large language models, quickly reaching unicorn status. Author of 'AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order' (2018), a widely read book on AI geopolitics. 01.AI pivoted away from frontier pretraining to enterprise decision AI (a Palantir-like positioning): audited 2025 revenue of RMB 250M, 2026 orders above RMB 1.5B, three 一号位 AI products launched Jul 2026, a Pre-IPO round under way (Jul 2026) and a target Hong Kong IPO in 2027 as the first profitable AI 2.0 company.