At our upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt SF (September 5-7), TechCrunch committed to go deep on artificial intelligence, and we’re pleased to announce a speaker who has few peers in that realm as a technologist or investor. Dr. Kai-Fu Lee is the CEO and chairman of Sinovation, a venture firm based in the U.S. and China, and he has emerged as one of the world’s top prognosticators on artificial intelligence and how the technology will disrupt just about everything. Dr. Lee wrote in The New York Times last year that AI is “poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.”
In his forthcoming book, “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order,” Dr. Lee expands on his AI thesis to argue that China has caught up to the United States in AI technology and that the two countries will dominate the AI globally, even as AI radically transforms the work world, necessitating dramatic new social programs.
That’s one seriously disruptive investment thesis, and it’s central to Sinovation’s 300 investments in the U.S. and China. Given Dr. Lee’s background, there is good reason to pay careful attention.
Equally at home in Taiwan, where he was born, Beijing where he lives and the United States, where he was educated and worked for many years, Dr. Lee completed his PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon by developing the world’s first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system. Dr. Lee went on to work for Apple, SGI and Microsoft, and in 2005 became the founding president of Google China. He launched Innovation Works (later re-named Sinovation) in 2009. In China and Taiwan, Dr. Lee is a business celebrity, thanks to the 50 million followers on his Sina Weibo micro-blogging profile, as well as his education projects, including Sinovation’s AI Institute, the firm’s Beijing-based lab of AI research and talent development.
Dr. Lee will also be on our Q&A stage (after his interview on the Main Stage) to take questions from attendees. You’ll need to grab your Innovator, Founder or Investor pass to take part in Dr. Lee’s Q&A session, as well as all of the other fantastic content exclusive to Disrupt SF attendees this September. Get your pass today and save with our early-bird discounts.