Cao Ting, a leading artificial intelligence researcher and former research manager at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), has left the US tech giant to join Tsinghua University, as AI becomes a new front in the US-China tech rivalry.
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According to the university’s website, Cao left MSRA in July to join Tsinghua’s Institute for AI Industry Research under Zhang Yaqin, a former MSRA managing director.
The Beijing-based MSRA, established by Bill Gates in 1998 to tap China’s “deep pool of intellectual talent” and once hailed as the “hottest computer lab in the world”, is under growing pressure.
US government restrictions on AI research in China, coupled with China’s own booming AI sector, has accelerated an exodus from the lab, casting uncertainty over the future of Microsoft’s key research hubs in Beijing and Shanghai.
Microsoft hired hundreds of researchers for MSRA, offering competitive pay and excellent working conditions. The lab pioneered Microsoft’s work on voice, image and facial recognition, as well as AI projects.
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The Beijing lab became one of the world’s most important laboratories in the field, growing into Microsoft’s biggest research facility outside the United States and its first in Asia.
