Death of five top Chinese AI scientists in recent years raises concerns over pressures of competition

Beijing: Five top Chinese AI scientists have died prematurely in recent years succumbing to heavy work pressure as China is locked in a tech war with the US in the Artificial Intelligence field, a media report said on Tuesday.

China was abuzz this year with DeepSeek, the latest AI offering that drew global attention for its low-cost model. Further, DeepSeek's R1 used a fraction of compute power as compared to established AI models like ChatGPT.

Also, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT as the top-ranked free app on Apple's Appstore, as the US tech industry - that has long justified injecting billions of dollars into AI investments — watched in sheer disbelief.

But while China has a growing AI talent pool and home-grown success stories, the country has also lost some of its leading figures in the crucial sector, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.

The early deaths of these experts – due to accidents or illness – have raised concerns about the personal safety of those in the industry and the stressful research environment they face, the report said.

Significantly, many of them studied in the US and returned to work in China.

Chinese computer scientist Liu Shaoshan said that while AI researchers might earn huge salaries, they were also under intense pressure.

“The industry is developing too fast and the competition is very fierce,” Liu told the Post, adding that by the time one researcher came up with an idea and made it halfway through an experiment, someone else might have already published on the same topic.

Liu added that practitioners also faced ethical pressures. “AI can also have a big impact on society as its use spreads, and this unknown potential for a huge change in society can also put them under very high moral pressure,” the Post quoted Liu as saying.

The report also compiled a list of top AI scientists who died – between 2022 and 2025 – at a relatively young age.

Most of them were in their scientific prime and had made discoveries in key areas such as computer vision, military artificial intelligence and medical AI, it said.

In June 2022, Sun Jian, chief scientist at Beijing-based AI company Megvii Technology, died of sudden illness at the age of 45.

Megvii is involved in developing image recognition and deep learning software.

Sun was a renowned figure in the field of AI and computer vision. A former Microsoft researcher with years of expertise in computer vision and computational photography, Sun returned to China from the US and joined start-up Megvii in 2016 as chief scientist and managing director of research.

Sun was named in the MIT Technology Review’s 'Innovators under 35' list in 2010. He also had 35 US patents to his name, 13 of which were registered internationally.

In July 2023, Feng Yanghe, 38, an expert on artificial intelligence for China’s defence sector, died in Beijing on his way to a “major mission” at the age of 38, according to an obituary.

Feng – whose research focused on war games, reinforcement learning and intelligent planning – was an associate professor at the National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) in central China’s Changsha, the report said.

One of the driving forces behind the AI software used in the country’s military simulations, he led teams that developed the War Skull I and War Skull II AI systems used by the People’s Liberation Army to simulate military war games for joint operations.

Before joining NUDT, Feng studied statistics at Harvard University and high-performance computing at the University of Iowa as part of a joint training programme from 2011 to 2013.

Also in 2023, AI expert Tang Xiaoou, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and founder of tech firm SenseTime, died at the age of 55.

According to his company’s obituary, Tang died after succumbing to an illness, the nature of which was not disclosed.

Tang received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui province in 1990 before moving to the US for graduate studies. He received his master’s degree from the University of Rochester in 1991 and his doctorate from MIT in 1996.

Tang, whose research interests included computer vision, pattern recognition and video processing, promoted the industrialisation of AI vision technology in China.

He Zhi, co-founder and chief innovation officer of AI-driven healthcare company Yidu Tech, died in 2024 at the age of 41.

He was an “outstanding pathfinder” who led the digitalisation of the healthcare industry, according to an obituary posted on social media.

It said he suffered respiratory and cardiac arrest due to altitude sickness while in Qinghai, an inland province in northwest China, according to the report.

He died in April last year after an unsuccessful attempt to save his life, according to the obituary.

His company described him as “an outstanding, consistent entrepreneur in artificial intelligence and big data who devoted all his energy to computer science and life science research”.

Also Quan Yuhui, a computer image processing expert and associate professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at South China University of Technology (SCUT) in south China’s Guangdong province, died of illness on January 14 this year at the age of 39, according to a university obituary. “We have lost a great young talent,” the obituary stated.

Quan studied in China and later at the National University of Singapore in 2016. Quan, whose research interests focused on the cutting-edge areas of computational photography, unsupervised learning and texture analysis, was a rising star in his field, the report said.

He led many national and provincial research projects, published more than 80 high-level scientific papers and served as a reviewer for prestigious international journals and conferences.

He was included on Stanford University’s “World’s top 2 per cent scientists” list in 2024, the Post reported.