Nvidia hires 2 top Chinese AI experts to make its AI smarter

Nvidia

Nvidia, the world’s leading AI chipmaker, has just brought two top artificial intelligence (AI) researchers on board — both originally from China. This move highlights how Chinese talent is playing an increasingly big role in the global AI race.

Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao, both graduates of China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, announced their new roles at Nvidia on social media. They even shared photos with Nvidia’s famous CEO, Jensen Huang.

Zhu recently completed his PhD at UC Berkeley and will now work as a principal research scientist on Nvidia’s Nemotron team — the group responsible for building powerful AI agents capable of handling tasks like coding, reasoning, and processing both text and visuals. Zhu also teaches as an assistant professor at the University of Washington.

“We’re focusing on improving how AI models learn after training, how they’re evaluated, and how we build AI systems that can act more like humans,” Zhu shared on X. He also said the team is committed to open-sourcing much of its work.

Jiao, who got his PhD from Stanford, has joined Nvidia with an ambitious goal — to push the boundaries of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), which are advanced forms of AI that could match or even surpass human intelligence. Jiao also holds a teaching position at UC Berkeley.

Interestingly, the two have worked together before. They co-founded a startup called Nexusflow AI in California, which built an AI model that could rival OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

Nvidia’s hiring comes as major tech firms are racing to grab top AI talent, with companies like Meta and Google also recruiting leading Chinese researchers from OpenAI and other firms.