Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee (born December 3, 1961) is a Taiwanese businessman, computer scientist, investor, and writer.

He is currently based in Beijing, China.

Lee developed a speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system as his Ph.D. thesis at Carnegie Mellon University.

He later worked as an executive, first at Apple, then SGI, Microsoft, and Google.

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.

He was a classmate of Barack Obama at Columbia.

In 1986, he and Sanjoy Mahajan developed Bill, a Bayesian learning-based system for playing the board game Othello that won the US national tournament of computer players in 1989.

He went on and received a doctor of philosophy in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988.

At Carnegie Mellon, Lee worked on topics in machine learning and pattern recognition.

In 1988, he completed his doctoral dissertation on Sphinx, which he claims is the first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system.

Lee has written two books on speech recognition and more than 60 papers in computer science.

His doctoral dissertation was published in 1988 as a Kluwer monograph, Automatic Speech Recognition: The Development of the Sphinx Recognition System (ISBN 0898382963).

Together with Alex Waibel, another Carnegie Mellon researcher, Lee edited Readings in Speech Recognition (1990, ISBN 1-55860-124-4).

After two years as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon, Lee joined Apple Computer in 1990 as a principal research scientist.

While at Apple (1990–1996), he headed R&D groups responsible for Apple Bandai Pippin, PlainTalk, Casper (speech interface), GalaTea (text to speech system) for Mac Computers.

Lee moved to Silicon Graphics in 1996 and spent a year as the Vice President of its Web Products division, and another year as president of its multimedia software division, Cosmo Software.

In 1998, Lee moved to Microsoft and went to Beijing, China where he played a key role in establishing the Microsoft Research (MSR) division there.

MSR China later became known as Microsoft Research Asia, regarded as one of the best computer science research labs in the world.

Lee returned to the United States in 2000 and was promoted to corporate vice president of interactive services division at Microsoft from 2000 to 2005.

He became the focus of a 2005 legal dispute between Google and Microsoft, his former employer, due to a one-year non-compete agreement that he signed with Microsoft in 2000 when he became its corporate vice president of interactive services.

In July 2005, Lee left Microsoft to take a position at Google.

The search company agreed to compensation worth in excess of $10 million, including a $2.5 million cash 'signing bonus' and another $1.5 million cash payment after one year, a package referred to internally at Google as 'unprecedented'.

On July 19, 2005, Microsoft sued Google and Lee in a Washington state court over Google's hiring of its former Vice President of Interactive Services, claiming that Lee was violating his non-compete agreement by working for Google within one year of leaving the Redmond-based software corporation.

Microsoft argued that Lee would inevitably disclose proprietary information to Google if he was allowed to work there.

On July 28, 2005, Washington state Superior Court Judge Steven González granted Microsoft a temporary restraining order, which prohibited Lee from working on Google projects that compete with Microsoft pending a trial scheduled for January 9, 2006.

Before the case could go to trial, on December 22, 2005, Google and Microsoft announced that they had reached a settlement whose terms are confidential, ending a five-month dispute between the two companies.

At Google China, Lee helped establish the company in the market and oversaw its growth in the country.

On September 13, following a hearing, Judge González issued a ruling permitting Lee to work for Google, but barring him from starting work on some technical projects until the case went to trial in January 2006.

Lee was still allowed to recruit employees for Google in China and to talk to government officials about licensing, but was prohibited from working on technologies such as search or speech recognition.

Lee was also prohibited from setting budgets, salaries, and research directions for Google in China until the case was to go to trial in January 2006.

He works in the Chinese internet sector and was the founding director of Microsoft Research Asia, serving from 1998 to 2000; and president of Google China, serving from July 2005 through September 4, 2009.

After resigning from his post, he founded Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm.

He created a website, Wǒxuéwǎng dedicated to helping young Chinese people in their studies and careers and wrote "10 Letters to Chinese College Students".

He is a micro-blogger in China, in particular on Sina Weibo, where he has over 50 million followers.

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.

In his 2018 book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, Lee describes how China is rapidly moving forward to become the global leader in Artificial intelligence, and may well surpass the United States, because of China's demographics and its amassing of huge data sets.

In a 28 September 2018 interview on the PBS Amanpour program, he stated that artificial intelligence, with all its capabilities, will never be capable of creativity or empathy.

Lee was born in Taipei, Taiwan.

He is the son of Li Tianmin, a legislator and historian from Sichuan, China.