Kai-Fu Lee

Founding Director of Microsoft Research Asia Computational linguistics Speech recognition Kai-Fu Lee (traditional Chinese: 李開復; simplified Chinese: 李开复; pinyin: Lǐ Kāifù; born December 3, 1961) is a Taiwanese computer scientist, investor, and author. He was the founding director of Microsoft Research China, later Microsoft Research Asia, serving from 1998 to 2000, and served as president of Google China 2005 to 2009. In 2009, Lee founded the venture capital firm Innovation Works, later renamed Sinovation Ventures. In 2023, he founded 01.AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company. Lee is the author of AI Superpowers (2018) and AI 2041 (with Chen Qiufan, 2021). He has served as co‑chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council and was named to TIME's 2023 list of the 100 most influential people in AI.