Alice Han

You know, I was just looking at back of the envelope, the founder of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, the founders and leaders of Taobao and Pinduoduo, China's biggest e-commerce platforms, the founder of Meituan, the Chinese chip maker, Cambricon, its founders also both went to genius schools, and engineers behind DeepSeek and Alibaba's Quen AI models.

I read a great think piece over the weekend in the FT where you formerly worked, James.

And the author who wrote this piece ends up revealing towards the end of the article that she also went to one of these genius schools.

But she describes how even humanities students worked more recently in AI companies like DeepSeek to help with their models because...

A lot of what these models have to deal with is real human intelligence, and that's just not isolated to STEM.

It goes to humanities and history and literature.

But it was fascinating to me doing research on this because I hadn't lived it personally, but I can see how it's having a real impact on generating talents at the top levels of education.

of China's tech companies, of China's corporates.

And it's something that I think has really floated under the radar.

And it's been around for decades.

That's the other thing.

It's not an overnight thing.

It's been around for decades, I believe since the 80s.

So this has been a concerted effort by the government to try to find talented individuals across all of the provinces in China.

And it reminds me a little bit of the imperial Chinese system, which is very much to try to find these scholar gentlemen in all the different far-flung provinces, bring them back to Beijing so that they could become basically ministers within the court of the Chinese emperor.

But in this case, you know, in the modern day scenario, these highly talented individuals then go out and proliferate and make companies and lead major tech firms.

One last thing that I will say is there apparently is a special class known as a Yao class.

Andrew Yao is the sole Chinese winner of the Turing Award, which is basically the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in CS.

and he, a couple of decades ago, moved from the States back to China, where he originally was from, and he's really become the champion intellect and professor of AI in China.

So apparently there is a class named after him at Tsinghua called the You Class, where the chief AI scientist at Tencent was one of his students, the founder of Moonshot, which has produced Kimmy, and the founder of Pony AI, as well as a range of these Chinese tech founders.