5 young Chinese scientists helping build US’s biggest AI systems

Many have risen to influential positions at leading U.S. technology companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google and xAI.

Researchers originating from China made up 38% of top-tier AI researchers working in the U.S. in 2022, slightly higher than the 37% who originated in the U.S., according to the MacroPolo Global AI Talent Tracker developed by the Chicago-based Paulson Institute and cited by the South China Morning Post.

Their influence is particularly evident at major AI labs. Seven of the first 11 researchers named to Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Superintelligence Labs were born in China, according to The New York Times.

Among the many Chinese-born scientists helping shape the U.S. AI industry, five have emerged as especially prominent figures.

Shengjia Zhao

Chinese AI scientist Shengjia Zhao. Photo from X

A computer science graduate of Tsinghua University, Zhao, 29, earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University before joining OpenAI in 2022.

He co-authored the original ChatGPT research paper and worked on GPT-4 before helping develop OpenAI's reasoning systems. He was among the foundational researchers behind o1, a model designed to spend more time working through complex problems before answering.

His research also extended to synthetic data, artificially generated information that can be used to train AI models.

Meta recruited Zhao in 2025 as CEO Mark Zuckerberg assembled a team to pursue superintelligence, referring to AI systems that could eventually surpass human capabilities across a range of tasks.

About a month after leaving OpenAI for Meta, Zhao was named chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs on July 25, 2025. Zuckerberg said he had co-founded the lab and served as its lead scientist from its inception before the leadership role was formalized, according to Reuters.

"Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field," Zuckerberg wrote in a social media post, as quoted by CNBC.

Zhao works directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO who serves as Meta's chief AI officer.

Yuhuai Wu

Chinese AI scientist Yuhuai Wu. Photo from X

Born and raised in Hangzhou, eastern China, Wu, 31, moved to Canada while in high school.

He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of New Brunswick in 2015 and a Ph.D. in machine learning from the University of Toronto in 2021, where he studied under AI researcher Jimmy Ba, a protégé of Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence.

Much of Wu's research has focused on teaching machines to reason. His academic website describes his research interest as "building machines that can reason."

After research positions or internships at OpenAI and Google's DeepMind, he joined Google as a research scientist in 2021. Two years later, he became one of the 12 founding members of Elon Musk's xAI, which emerged as a rival to OpenAI and other leading AI labs.

Wu focused on mathematical reasoning and became a core developer of Grok, xAI's flagship chatbot. He appeared alongside Musk during the launch of Grok 3 in February 2025.

He left xAI in February 2026 and later joined the board of an aging-focused startup. His departure made him one of six members of xAI's original 12-person founding team to have left the company.

"It's time for my next chapter," Wu wrote on X. "It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible."

Jiahui Yu

Chinese AI scientist Jiahui Yu. Photo from LinkedIn

Yu, 31, earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Special Class for the Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China before pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, according to Chinese technology outlet 36Kr.

His early research focused on computer vision. During an internship at Adobe in 2017, he worked on DeepFill, technology designed to reconstruct missing portions of images and remove unwanted objects.

Yu later joined Google, where he co-led multimodal development for Gemini. Multimodal AI enables a system to process different forms of information, including text, images, audio and video. He moved to OpenAI in 2023 and eventually led its Perception team. His work included GPT-4o and its image-generation capabilities, as well as the company's o3 and o4-mini reasoning models.

Meta recruited Yu in 2025 alongside Zhao and other OpenAI researchers as Zuckerberg intensified his push to attract leading AI talent.

At Meta Superintelligence Labs, he co-founded an internal research group and worked on multimodal AI before leaving. His LinkedIn profile now says he is starting a new company.

Lilian Weng

Chinese AI scientist Lilian Weng. Photo courtesy of OpenAI

Born in China's Shaanxi Province, Weng won first prize in the provincial division of China's National High School Mathematics Competition in 2004 before entering Peking University the following year.

She later earned a Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington and worked at Dropbox and fintech company Affirm before joining OpenAI in 2018, according to Business Insider.

During nearly seven years at OpenAI, Weng worked on robotics, founded its Applied AI Research team and later led Safety Systems. She eventually became vice president of research and safety and contributed to work on GPT-4.

She left OpenAI in 2024 and became a co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup established by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati.

She stepped down from the startup in July 2026, citing health concerns.

"I don’t feel I’m able to continue at the pace a startup requires," she wrote in an internal Slack message that she also shared on X on July 28. "After thinking about it for several months, I ultimately have to admit that the amount of consistent stress and workload have pushed me beyond what my health can sustain physically."

Days later, OpenAI told TechCrunch that Weng, who is in her late 30s, would rejoin the company and lead a team focused on accelerating internal research, including work related to recursive self-improvement, in which AI is used to help develop increasingly capable AI systems.

Carina Hong

Carina Hong, founder of AI startup Axiom Math. Photo courtesy of MIT

Hong, 24, grew up in Guangzhou before studying mathematics and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She later studied neuroscience at the University of Oxford and pursued graduate studies at Stanford University.

Hong left her Stanford mathematics Ph.D. program to establish Axiom Math, a U.S. startup seeking to build an "AI mathematician" capable of generating and rigorously proving mathematical theorems.

"We’re not building another chatbot that mimics solutions," Hong said. "We’re teaching AI to prove theorems. That’s a fundamentally different challenge and one worth pursuing."

Axiom initially raised $64 million and recruited established researchers from Meta and academia, including renowned mathematician Ken Ono, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The startup, based in the same offices where Zuckerberg built Facebook, had grown to about 20 employees by early 2026, according to The New York Times.

In March, Axiom raised $200 million in a Series A funding round led by Menlo Ventures, lifting its valuation to $1.6 billion just five months after it had been valued at $300 million.