The Chinese whiz kids of Silicon Valley

Last fall, I moved into Mark Zuckerberg’s old house. A pale blue ranch home dubbed the Facebook House, it was perched in the hills of Los Altos, an affluent enclave in the heart of Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg moved into the house in the fall of 2004, turning it into the headquarters of what was then still called “thefacebook.” At the time, the future social media empire had several hundred thousand users and was restricted to college students. 

Two decades and 3 billion users later, Zuckerberg now owns a five-house compound in nearby Palo Alto. But a framed photo of him working on a laptop, wearing a bright red hoodie and sitting in the living room of the Facebook House, was still prominently displayed when I showed up in October.

I found the house through RedNote, a popular Chinese social network. Previous guests of the Facebook House posted photos of themselves attending talks and carving up a tuna inside the auspicious space. When I reached out to the house’s primary tenant, Elvis Wu, a Shanghai native in his early 30s, he offered me a room for $60 a night. Perks included access to gatherings sometimes attended by the biggest names in artificial intelligence. I booked five nights. 

I was on a mission to better understand the community of young, talented, and intensely in-demand Chinese AI researchers who had installed themselves across Silicon Valley. Top research scientists were being courted like NBA stars. Stories circulated of a Chinese researcher being poached by Meta from Apple with a $200 million compensation package — only to be poached again by OpenAI. In my day-to-day work covering the tech industry, I saw more and more Chinese names cropping up in lists of AI startup founders, as authors of influential machine learning studies, or as the architects behind Silicon Valley’s buzziest AI models. 

As a recent Chinese immigrant myself, I had a sense for who these people were, and their trajectories. They were the ones who beat out millions of others to be at the top of their classes. They won math Olympiads and got into the best programs at the best universities. Later, they decided to move to Silicon Valley, leveraging their math prowess and relentless work ethic toward advancing AI and landing seven-figure compensation packages.

Geopolitically, U.S.-China relations are at their lowest point in decades. But America’s AI boom has created an incredibly lucrative opportunity for these techies. I grew up alongside them, and  wanted to know what their lives were like: Are they destined to become the next generation of Silicon Valley leaders?

Chinese tech workers don’t love speaking to the media, and they don’t have a reputation for flamboyance: The most talented engineers largely stay out of the public eye and sport laptop backpacks with company logos. Apart from discussing neural network technicalities on X, most of them are too busy, too protective of their knowledge, or too wary of becoming ensnared in tense U.S.-China relations to speak to a journalist like me. I emailed dozens of them, and got no response.  

So I came to them, showing up at Zuckerberg’s old house on a rainy afternoon. Elvis, wearing a headband, drinking a Diet Coke, and holding a framed photo of Zuckerberg, gave me the house tour. He told me about the home’s storied past, including an apocryphal tale of a monk who blessed the house before Zuckerberg moved in. For a place with such a legendary and fortuitous past, it felt very much like a house full of college students — maybe similar to how it was when 20-year-old Zuckerberg still lived there.

A mattress lay haphazardly in one corner of a living room. A bookshelf was filled with titles like Build and Trillion Dollar Coach. There was a stuffed dinosaur wearing a Harvard shirt, and a Labubu wearing a visor that read, “AI CLOUD 100 CHINA.” Five cats roamed the house: Energy, Future, Lucky, Mission, and Vision. Kitty litter was scattered around the sparsely decorated room I had rented. The bed sheets were wrinkly.

Five people lived in the house at the time of my visit. Those included Elvis, who occupied Zuckerberg’s old room; Elvis’ younger brother, who was working on his own AI startup; and a young Chinese woman working on something investment-related. When I told her I wasn’t founding a startup but that I worked in the media, a pitiful look came across her face. “That’s okay,” she said in a comforting tone. 

On my first night, the house hosted a party for the Chinese Entrepreneurs Organization, or CEO, attended by about three dozen people including some Stanford students. A hired chef roasted a whole lamb in the yard, which we ate off paper plates. Guests exchanged endless thoughts about how AI could be applied to robotics, social media, and education, until even some attendees had had enough. “It’s like you don’t deserve to live if you don’t work on AI,” one robotics product manager confided to me. 

Over the next two months, I networked my way deep into the Chinese AI crowd, speaking with more than two dozen people, and attending their dinners, conference sessions, and parties. I found a world in which intense optimism about the transformative power of AI was mixed in equal parts with a deep anxiety over employment, money, and what it means to be Chinese immigrants in a polarized America. Talk of an AI bubble was everywhere. In the meantime, there was money to be made and clout to be chased.

Elvis declined to speak to me on the record. But his collaborator, an entrepreneur named Dawei Shi, sat me down at one point and gave me their vision for the Facebook House: The two rented the house in 2023, and created a nonprofit organization called OpenNetwork — the name inspired by OpenAI — to foster and support the Silicon Valley AI community, including the Chinese researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors. 

Over the past three years, the Facebook House has become a landmark for those who know. Shi showed me the house’s guest book, pointing out prominent names: co-founders of RedNote and Xiaomi, a famed venture capitalist, a prominent professor at the prestigious Peking University, a property tycoon. “We hope to pass the good fortune to Chinese people,” Shi told me. The house hosts AI-themed talks, provides free accommodation to founders, and introduces investors, entrepreneurs, and researchers to each other. When techies come to Silicon Valley, Shi said, the house should be their first stop. 

The role of the Chinese immigrants in the tech industry is changing, Christine Qing, an investor with China-founded tech investment group Shanda and a Facebook House partygoer, told me later. After studying in the U.S., Qing came to Silicon Valley a decade ago and now organizes regular gatherings for researchers at leading AI companies. In the software era, Chinese engineers played supporting roles. In the AI era, Qing said, they’re taking center stage.

Immigrants have played a critical role in Silicon Valley’s astronomical rise since the 1960s, and they’ve come in waves. Russian Jews fled anti-Semitism and the Soviet Union’s collapse, Taiwanese families sent children to America for a better education, and Indian students came for graduate school. By 1990, one-third of the scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley’s tech industries were foreign-born, most of them of Chinese or Indian descent.

For immigrants without family wealth or established networks in the U.S., the tech industry offered a means to quickly climb the socioeconomic ladder, and make good money, too. “You can prove yourself, not based on your credentials, but on your coding skills or your raw entrepreneurship,” Kyle Chan, a research fellow at think tank Brookings Institution, told me.

Many immigrants working in tech started out as engineers before rising to become executives and founders. Sergey Brin, who left the Soviet Union and grew up in Maryland, co-founded Google; Taiwanese-born Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, who came to America as children, went on to head the chip giants Nvidia and AMD. Indian-born executives Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Arvind Krishna now lead Google, Microsoft, and IBM, respectively.

The AI boom has spurred a new class of Chinese founders and engineers into the spotlight. These are people like Carina Hong, a 24-year-old who grew up as a math lover in Guangzhou. As a teenager, she studied calculus and number theory and competed in math olympiads. She went to MIT, then Stanford, before dropping out to found Axiom, an AI mathematics startup that develops systems to verify AI reasoning. The 1-year-old company, based next door to an old Facebook office in Palo Alto, is valued at $1.6 billion. Math olympiad training in China made her resilient to paint and gave her a “Scout” mentality, while her education in America gave her cultural and language fluency, Hong told me over Zoom. She sums up her life philosophy as “scientific ambition.” 

Tim Shi graduated from the elite Yao Class at Tsinghua University, a program known for having trained some of China’s brightest students into tech founders and computer science professors. He also came to Stanford and dropped out of the Ph.D. program. He joined OpenAI and left a year later to co-found an AI company, Cresta. The company automates customer service, and was valued at $1.6 billion in 2022. He has since become an investor in other AI firms, including Anthropic. 

In Silicon Valley, Chinese researchers have founded AI startups that make everything from video generation models to agentic assistants to smart notetakers. Chinese scientists are among the co-founders of Elon Musk’s xAI, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, and Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs. When Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, seven of the first 11 hires, including the chief scientist, were from China. 

I met Cresta’s Shi at a coffee shop in downtown San Francisco. He had his headphones wrapped around his neck and sipped on iced tea as he told me about how, as a high schooler in Shanghai, he revered Steve Jobs. As a teenager, he built a voice-controlled mobile calling system, which won first prize at a youth tech competition.  

By the time Shi was attending Stanford in 2016, people like him were so valued that Sam Altman helped him with getting an O-1 visa, reserved for people with extraordinary abilities. Shi said that members of his cohort maintain relatively humble lifestyles, and focus on their work. “It’s not good to have too many distractions in life,” he said. He sometimes kitesurfs after work, and plays Texas Hold’em with friends who also work in AI. But for the most part, Shi said, “researchers’ lives are quite boring. It wouldn’t look interesting in writing.”

The thrill comes from the work itself, some told me. Realizing the promise of AGI — artificial general intelligence systems that supersede human abilities — represents a singular opportunity. Another AI researcher compared his work to being a rock musician in the 1960s. They witness inspiring progress every day and feel destined to be written into human history. Like other employees at tech companies, he requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. “Building AGI is the only storyline that matters to the world right now,” he told me. “Everything else has become irrelevant.”

Growing up, I personally witnessed how a generation of whiz kids were targeted for success by the Chinese education system. Coming of age in the 2000s, my classmates and I were children of the one-child policy. Our families invested everything into our education — especially mathematics. In primary school, I was placed in math-olympiad classes, and assigned geometry and algebra puzzles designed to identify whether I was truly gifted. (It was there that I learned, to the disappointment of both myself and my parents, that I was not.)

Chinese society has long promoted scientific and technical proficiency, an effort that traces back to the fall of the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century. Back then, public intellectuals argued that China’s lack of scientific knowledge left it vulnerable to Western invasion. Excelling in the sciences became a matter of national defense and pride.

A century later, the educational system still heavily emphasizes science and technology. When I attended a top-ranked public high school in Hangzhou around 2010, there were 11 science-focused classes, and only two humanities classes. I enrolled in a science class. During lunch breaks, we watched The Big Bang Theory and idolized the socially awkward physics geek Sheldon Cooper. While many American high schoolers dreamed of becoming athletes and musicians, in China excelling in math and physics was considered the ultimate proof of their achievement. 

Eventually,  I moved to Hong Kong to study journalism — a bizarre choice in the eyes of my friends. An education influencer would later famously tell Chinese parents they should knock their children unconscious if they want to study journalism, because there would be no money to be made.

My classmates went into more “serious” fields. Under a government push to strengthen China’s fundamental research capabilities, top universities established specialized programs to groom future scientists, marked by intense competition and extremely heavy workloads. The Yao Class in Beijing and the ACM Class at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University are widely regarded as the two best programs in computer science.

“Till this day, I haven’t encountered anything more challenging in an engineering sense,” said Xinyu Yang, an ACM graduate who is now a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. Yang recalled being pushed to build software with up to 30,000 lines of code. Those who couldn’t keep up dropped out of the class.

For those who made it, the natural next step was a doctoral degree in the U.S., where they’d get to work with the biggest names in science. As research in AI began taking off in the 2010s, Chinese students gravitated toward subjects like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. The development of AI systems, it turned out, required the exact combination of mathematical reasoning and the relentless willingness to grind that they had developed in school. Chinese scientists thrived in the field.

When ChatGPT launched in 2022 and investors poured money into any and every company associated with AI, Chinese talent was in the right place at the right time. The immigrant Ph.D.s, now working from Silicon Valley’s AI labs, put in 16-hour days designing model architectures, preparing training data, and racing to beat benchmarks, with the same persistence and competitiveness they had honed in Chinese schools. “Chinese people move about like an army,” one Nvidia researcher told me. 

During my stay at the Facebook House, I reconnected with the kind of math kids who had intimidated me so much in my school days. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by their employers to talk to a reporter. In a Fremont restaurant, I had lamb skewers with two former classmates. One was now a Nvidia scientist; the other was a machine-learning engineer at a midsize software company. As we talked, a live guitarist at the restaurant sang the Mandopop classic, “You, My Deskmate.” 

The Nvidia engineer had studied civil engineering in China, but switched to computer science when he came to the U.S. That was the default path for Chinese students in the 2010s, he told me. He recalled developing a spirit of persistence and focus as a student, and applying it to his Ph.D. studies and to building AI systems. When Chinese scientists shared their latest research, they sometimes added the idiom ri gong yi zu — one pawn forward every day.   

We talked about Silicon Valley issues: housing prices, Tesla’s self-driving feature, and which  hotpot restaurant Jensen Huang had visited (Feng Hotpot in Sunnyvale). My classmates’ hard work paid off in the form of an upper-middle-class life. The machine-learning engineer and her husband had a two-bedroom apartment in Fremont. The Nvidia researcher’s wife was taking a career break to manage the couple’s stock portfolio. Some friends of his had started companies, and he was considering doing that, too.  

In Mountain View, I shared blood curd stew mao xue wang with a Google DeepMind scientist and an ex-Meta researcher. Both had graduated from China’s top-ranked Tsinghua University — the Google guy wore his Tsinghua shirt to dinner. “I’ve been good at math since kindergarten,” the ex-Meta researcher told me. Growing up in a backwater town in central China, he had taught himself olympiad math and physics in high school. “The regular curriculum was too easy, so I read up on more difficult things to feel some happiness of learning,” he said. 

Life in Silicon Valley has changed their worldviews. The researcher said he found indie movies and literature less appealing than he had before, because working in AI felt like starring in his own movie. “AI is the most pioneering thing,” he told me. “Other things are just not as cool.”

To grasp the full prowess and ambition of Chinese AI talent and hear their aspirations, I headed to NeurIPS, the world’s biggest AI research conference. It took place in San Diego and attracted more than 24,000 participants. For a week, AI scientists in their windbreakers and laptop backpacks filled up every downtown hotel, restaurant, and coffee shop. 

It was also the most Chinese conference I’d ever been to in America — an analysis by research group MacroPolo found that, in 2022, nearly half of the NeurIPS paper authors had obtained undergraduate degrees in China. Mandarin was spoken as often as English. 

“Meta just poached someone from your school with $2.5 million,” I overheard in Mandarin from a group of Chinese men in hoodies and sneakers. WeChat groups buzzed with tips about nearby Asian restaurants and celebrity scientist sightings. Computer vision pioneer Kaiming He, who was born in China, was spotted in the lobby and quickly surrounded by dozens of eager Chinese attendees angling for selfies.  

In one sprawling hall, researchers stood by thousands of posters, pitching their latest inventions — from new reinforcement learning architectures to a computational framework designed to teach robots how to swim. Another hall was lined with elaborate booths run by top AI and quantitative-trading firms. One company deployed a robot barista to lure candidates. 

Headhunters roamed the floor, scanning research papers and poaching people from the leading AI labs. I was briefly stopped by a Tencent recruiter who — to his great disappointment — had misread the word “media” on my badge as “Meta.”

Conversations with researchers included sci-fi scenarios. “If AI and humans got into a war, we would be the underdogs,” Cheng Xin, a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University, told me in a hallway. He went on to paint a world where AI creates journalism by automatically extracting information from everyone’s brain. One Google researcher, an Elon Musk fan, believed AI would help bring a Marxist society closer to us by drastically boosting productivity. A scientist at another American tech giant envisioned the technology creating a more equitable world: Everyone would be equally entitled to knowledge and robot assistants. 

Then there were the banal anxieties about money and jobs — and how to optimize one’s career while the boom lasts. I met students who were looking to switch to AI from business, finance, and academia because they saw AI as an industry that’s both well-funded and Chinese-friendly. In AI, event invites and job openings circulate on WeChat as much as on X. “Chinese is the language of AI,” Jonathan Li, a Chinese American who works at an AI startup, told me at the conference. 

Almost everyone described the Chinese AI world as juan, or “involution,” a buzzword that refers to incessant, grueling competition. Depending on whether someone has connections or specializes in a particular line of research, one engineer can earn $500,000 a year, while another may earn $50 million. A Google scientist making more than $600,000 said he was anxious about not being able to afford an apartment located in a good school district. He wasn’t married, and didn’t have a child. But he was still worried. “Others are making millions, and I want that, too,” he told me. 

Those that succeed retain humble lifestyles. I heard stories of engineers dining at Michelin-star restaurants and vacationing in luxury hotels in Hawaii. Some bought more expensive clothes and skincare products. A few splurged on Porsches. But mostly, they invested their money, often into AI stocks. 

Many say they’re eager to reach FIRE status — Financial Independence, Retire Early — before they themselves are automated by AI. Some worry the AI bubble is going to burst soon, turning their stock options into worthless “paper money.” 

“We are not doctors or lawyers who will earn this money for life,” a researcher at an AI startup told me. “We may be unemployed in two years, or at best, within five to 10 years.” 

Politics loomed in the background. Across Silicon Valley, China is both admired as an engineering powerhouse and treated with suspicion. Industry leaders like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei often play up the threat of Chinese AI dominance, potentially to bolster their own importance. Venture capitalists have retreated from China, forcing entrepreneurs to move abroad. Two California-based founders I spoke to declined to speak on the record because they were worried that being identified as Chinese would spook potential investors or clients. 

U.S.-China tensions have put the Chinese community at a disadvantage, Shanda’s Qing told me. The paranoia around China has created invisible hurdles for Chinese talent, potentially making it harder for them to secure high valuations or take leadership roles. “With a Chinese face, you are only able to show a part of your true power,” she told me. “[But] you have to believe there will be a way out.” 

Everyone I spoke to at the conference was laser-focused on their work. Walking through the halls, I spotted Hanrui Wang, the young co-founder of Eigen AI, a startup that makes faster, compute-efficient models. A graduate of China’s prestigious Fudan University and MIT, the 29-year-old had started the company a few months ago, while sleeping on a mattress in the living room of the Facebook House.  

At his booth, several monitors showed Eigen models transforming images of the visitors into Superman cartoons or illustrations in the style of Ukiyo-e art. Wang, wearing braces and an Eigen hoodie, spent the days schmoozing with teachers, researcher friends, and clients, and handing out merch that included webcam covers and Eigen stickers. 

Chinese immigrant founders like Wang embody a “die trying” mentality, remarked Shin Chen, a Taiwanese investor with MIT-affiliated venture capital firm E14 Fund who has backed Eigen. These founders have deep technical skills and the work ethic to sleep in the office and take calls on weekends, she told me at the booth. “We should be building a new Chinese AI mafia in Silicon Valley,” Chen said. “[AI] is going to become our home turf.”

The AI carnival continued into the night across San Diego: A Canadian AI startup paid for the researchers to dance on top of the USS Midway aircraft carrier. OpenAI served cocktails named “AGI Readiness” and “Mission Alignment.” A data annotation startup threw a party at a Mexican restaurant, blasting club music and handing out fliers resembling U.S. dollar bills. 

Eigen’s party, at a fusion restaurant with a giant Buddha statue, served sushi, and cheesecake. There was a series of machine learning presentations by scientists at MIT, UCLA, and Google. Wang, the young founder, quoted Adam Smith’s theory of the division of labor as he pitched Eigen as a contributor to the AI economy. In May, Dutch cloud computing company Nebius announced it would acquire Eigen for about $634 million.

After six months of trying to figure out whether AI presented a breakout moment for these Chinese techies within Silicon Valley, I came away with a strong sense of their cultish belief in AI’s potential, but without a clear vision of their own futures. In part because of the political pressures they face, I got the sense that many of them will continue to grind in the shadow of American tech titans — wary of the spotlight despite their financial and technical achievements.

Back in New York, I met Liangcheng Zhou, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist scouting for AI hardware startups. He keeps a close eye on the type of Chinese AI researchers I’d met in California — partly by making trips out to the Facebook House. When Zhou came to the U.S. as a physics researcher in the early 2000s, he recalled, Chinese students were poor and desperate for corporate jobs. But the young generation are eager to do more. 

One of them will become the next Musk helming a trillion-dollar company, Zhou said to me with excitement. “Chinese people tend to follow set paths,” he said. “But once they spend a few years on the iconoclastic land of America, they will change.”