The AI Talent Exodus: Why Alibaba Becomes the Top Destination

Talent competition among technology giants has never stopped. On November 22, the Chinese Academy of Engineering announced the 2019 academicians, with Alibaba’s Technical Committee Chairman Wang Jian elected as an academician. Wang joined Alibaba in 2008 after serving as executive vice‑president of Microsoft Research Asia.

A recent “World AI Giants Talent Flow Map” went viral, showing massive movement of AI talent among leading companies. The diagram highlights Baidu and Microsoft as the two giants suffering the most talent loss, while Alibaba appears as the biggest winner, attracting top scientists from foreign universities and research institutes as well as from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Sony, and Amazon.

01 Alibaba Becomes the Biggest Winner

Alibaba’s AI strategy focuses on empowering industries. In 2014, iDST (Institute of Data Science and Technology) was founded as the core AI provider. In 2016, Alibaba AI Lab was established, and in 2017 the “NASA Plan” was launched to reserve core technologies for the next 20 years. In October 2017, the DAMO Academy was created to invite global top talent.

Over the past five years, Alibaba has quietly entered the first tier of the global AI race, with most of the incoming AI experts joining the DAMO Academy.

Lihi Zelnik‑Manor – Head of Israel Machine Vision Lab at DAMO Academy (joined November 2018).

Li Fei‑Fei – Vice President of Alibaba Group and head of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Database Business Unit (joined May 2018).

Shi Yaoyun – Chief Quantum Technology Scientist of Alibaba Cloud and director of the Quantum Lab (joined September 2017).

Mario Szegedy – Two‑time Gödel Award winner, joined Alibaba Cloud Quantum Lab in Seattle (early 2018).

Wang Gang – Head of Intelligent Transportation Lab at DAMO Academy (joined March 2017).

Si Luo – Head of Language Technology Lab, creator of AliNLP (joined 2014).

Qi Yuan – Leader of Ant Financial Data Technology, built Alibaba’s first massive machine‑learning platform (joined 2014).

Jin Rong – Head of Machine Intelligence Research at DAMO Academy, expert in statistical machine learning (joined 2014).

02 AI Talent Leaving Baidu

Despite being the earliest AI player among the BAT giants, Baidu has suffered from a talent drain. The “AI Yellow‑Army” at Baidu has seen many scientists come and go, and several senior engineers have launched their own startups.

Lu Qi – Joined Baidu as President and COO in 2017, left in 2018 to join Y Combinator.

Andrew Ng – Joined Baidu as Chief Scientist in 2014, left in 2017 to found Deeplearning.ai, Landing.ai, and AI Fund.

Lin Yuanqing – Former director of Baidu IDL, left in 2017 to start Aibee.

Lou Tiancheng – Former chief architect of Baidu’s autonomous driving, co‑founded Pony.ai in 2018.

Wang Jin – Former senior VP of Baidu Autonomous Driving, founded Jingchi Technology.

Han Xu – Former chief scientist of Baidu Autonomous Driving, later CTO of Jingchi.

03 Microsoft as a Talent Transfer Hub

Microsoft Research Asia has long been called the “AI Huangpu Military Academy”. Over the years, it has supplied talent to Baidu, Alibaba, Google, and Tencent. Notable moves include:

Wang Jian – Former executive VP of MSRA, joined Alibaba in 2008 and became CTO.

Hua Xiansheng – Joined Alibaba Cloud Vision team in 2016 after MSRA.

Yan Zhijie – Head of DAMO Academy Speech Lab, former MSRA speech team lead.

Nie Zaiqing – Head of Alibaba DAMO AI Lab Beijing, former senior researcher at MSRA.

Zhou Jingren – Head of Intelligent Computing Lab, former Microsoft research partner.

Microsoft’s talent pipeline has also fed Baidu, but Baidu could only be a temporary stop for many researchers.

The overall picture shows that AI talent is highly mobile, with Alibaba currently attracting the largest share of world‑class scientists, while Baidu and Microsoft act as major talent sources for the broader industry.