he computer scientist known in the West for his bestseller “AI Superpowers” and in China for his bets on artificial intelligence unicorns, has a new venture — and a great ambition.
In late March, Lee launched a company called 01.AI with the vision to develop a homegrown large language model for the Chinese market. The venture puts him in competition with other prominent Chinese tech leaders, including Sogou’s founder Wang Xiaochuan, who have been swiftly gathering talent and venture capital to establish China’s equivalents of OpenAI.
Lee was born in Taipei, Taiwan.[7] He is the son of Li Tianmin, a legislator and historian from Sichuan, China. Lee has detailed his personal life and career history in his autobiography in both Chinese and English, Making a World of Difference, published in October 2011.[8]
In 1973, Lee immigrated to the United States and attended high school in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He received a Bachelor of Science summa cum laude with a major in computer science from Columbia University in the City of New York in 1983.[9][10] He was a classmate of Barack Obama at Columbia.[11] He went on and received a doctor of philosophy in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988.[12][13]