Kai-Fu Lee is a Taiwanese-born computer scientist, investor, and author whose career spans speech recognition research, leadership roles at Apple, Microsoft, and Google (where he was founding head of Google China), and venture capital through his firm Sinovation Ventures. He completed a PhD at Carnegie Mellon and built one of the early continuous-speech-recognition systems before moving into industry and investment.
He is best known to a general audience for his 2018 book “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,” which argued that China had caught up with the United States at astonishing speed and that the two would form an AI duopoly shaped by their different cultures and data advantages. The book popularised the framing of AI as a great-power contest and warned about job displacement and inequality. In 2023 Lee founded the large-language-model company 01.AI.
Why a business reader should care: Lee did more than anyone to put China on the mental map of the AI race, and his “AI superpowers” thesis frames much of how governments and companies now think about national AI strategy and competition.