'I have to do it': Why one of the world's most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China

'I have to do it': Why one of the world's most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China In 2020, after spending half his life in the US, Song-Chun Zhu took a one-way ticket to China. By the time Song-Chun Zhu was six years old, he had encountered death more times than he could count. This was the early 1970s, the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, and his father ran a village supply store in rural China . There was little to do beyond till the fields and study Mao Zedong at home, and so the shop became a refuge where people could rest, recharge and share tales. Zhu grew up in that shop, absorbing a lifetime's worth of tragedies: a family friend lost in a car crash, a relative from an untreated illness, stories of suicide or starvation. "That was really tough," Zhu recalled recently. The young Zhu became obsessed with what people left behind after they died. One day, he came across a book that contained his family genealogy. When he asked the bookkeeper why it included his ancestors' dates of birth and death but nothing about their lives, the man told him matter of factly that they were peasants, so there was nothing worth recording. He resolved that his fate would be different. Today, at 56, Zhu is one of the world's leading authorities in artificial intelligence. In 1992, he left China for the US to pursue a PhD in computer science at Harvard. Later, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he led one of the most prolific AI research centres in the world, won numerous major awards, and attracted prestigious research grants from the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation. He was celebrated for his pioneering research into how machines can spot patterns in data, which helped lay the groundwork for modern AI systems such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. He and his wife, and their two US-born daughters, lived in a hilltop home on Los Angeles's Mulholland Drive. He thought he would never leave. But in August 2020, after 28 years in the US, Zhu astonished his colleagues and friends by suddenly moving back to China, where he took up professorships at two top Beijing universities and a directorship in a state-sponsored AI institute.