The Hong Kong Government Has Recruited a Top AI Scientist. Its Plan Goes Beyond China’s Borders

Yang Hongxia isn’t just another AI guru. The Chinese scientist has spent much of her career at IBM, Yahoo, Alibaba, and ByteDance. She’s the main person responsible for the AI breakthroughs at Alibaba and ByteDance. Interestingly, her career has just taken an unexpected turn. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University has hired her to teach in its computer science department.

At first glance, the scope of this hire may seem modest, but it isn’t. It’s a significant move orchestrated by the Hong Kong government as part of its strategy to transform the Chinese city into an international technology hub specializing in the AI and semiconductor industries. In fact, Yang is already recruiting graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to specialize in generative AI and distributed computing technologies.

One of Yang’s career milestones is her participation in developing the 10-billion-parameter M6 large-scale language model while working at Alibaba. This model is the predecessor of Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen. However, her return to academia highlights the interest of the Chinese government, particularly the Hong Kong government, in attracting highly qualified professionals with a proven track record in business to universities.

Hong Kong’s Master Plan is Already Underway

At the end of March 2023, Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, the leader of the New People’s Party (NPP), a very influential conservative political party in Hong Kong, published a fascinating article in which she defended, among other things, the implementation in her city of the strategy that has allowed Singapore to consolidate its current technological development. Hong Kong’s special administrative regime allows China to use the city as a test bed. According to the NPP chairwoman, the government plans to transform the city into an international technology and innovation center, clearly inspired by Singapore.

China urgently needs to develop its technology to overcome the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies. It has the economic resources and industrial ecosystem to do so, but to enable the development of its photolithography technologies, which is the biggest challenge it faces in a strategic industry like the chip industry, it needs more. According to Ip and other experts, it has to attract talent abroad.

This strategy has allowed Singapore to maintain the technological development it has fostered in recent years. China, however, sees Hong Kong's immediate future as a hub for its semiconductor and AI industries. A priority for China is to focus its development and innovation power on quantum computing and biomedicine. At stake is its economic, technological, and industrial development in the face of a Western alliance led by the U.S., unwilling to give up an inch of ground.

This article was written by Juan Carlos López and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.

Image | Ben Cheung

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