Former JD.com Technology Head Seeks Talent for Chinese Version of ChatGPT

The call to develop the Chinese version of ChatGPT has resulted in urgent and fierce competition between Chinese tech giants for top AI talent. On February 26, Zhou Bowen, former chairman of the JD.com’s technical committee and founder of Xianyuan Technology, published a post to recruit R&D and algorithm scientists.

This post follows similar headhunting efforts by other tech entrepreneurs, including Wang Huiwen, former co-founder of Meituan, and Li Zhifei, the founder of tech firm Mobvoi, who also recently posted ads to hire data scientists and developers.

Zhou was previously the chief scientist at IBM Watson. In 2017, he became the vice president of JD.com and head of AI research. He reported directly to Richard Liu, CEO of JD.com, and helped the company gain over ten AI scientists. In 2021, Zhou left JD.com and started his venture in AI, founding Xianyuan Technology. He also holds the positions of Huiyan Chair Professor and Professor of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University.

In his post, Zhou introduced Xianyuan Technology, which has been established now for over one year. The company hopes to help businesses and consumers further realize the potential of AI through innovative products.

Zhou also mentioned, “I believe that China’s OpenAI needs to explore a new strategy, that is, vertically integrating large models, specific applications, and users.”

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According to media outlet The Paper, Zhou’s areas of research span speech and natural language processing, multimodal knowledge representations, man-machine dialogues, ethics of AI, and more. He believes that the core competency of ChatGPT is to complete tasks through collaborative interaction. The dialog box of ChatGPT is only the surface, but integrating its capabilities with human tasks will be key to realizing its deeper potential.

Zhou added that it is critical for the future of the technology to allow AI to gain a better understanding of human intentions and judgments through interactive learning, obtain a large amount of information and data, make complex reasoning, present logical processes, and help people make decisions.