A series of mysterious deaths of leading AI scientists has swept across China

The field of artificial intelligence has become the biggest battleground in the China-US tech war, especially after DeepSeek and other companies challenged American dominance. China has a growing pool of AI talent, with notable success stories, but the country has lost several leading figures in a crucial sector. The sudden deaths of several experts, either through accidents or illness, have raised concerns about the personal safety of those working in the field and doing research.

Sun Jian. Image source: scmp.com

AI researchers are highly paid, but they also have enormous responsibility. In a highly competitive environment, one researcher may come up with an idea and take a project to the experimental stage, while another may publish a paper on the same topic. The South China Morning Post compiled a list of leading AI scientists who passed away at a relatively young age. Most of them were in their prime and made important discoveries in areas such as computer vision, military and medical AI.

In June 2022, Sun Jian, the chief scientist of Megvii Technology, a Beijing-based AI company, died of a sudden illness at the age of 45. The company develops software for image recognition and deep learning. Sun was a well-known figure in the fields of AI and computer vision. Previously a researcher at Microsoft with many years of experience in computer vision and computational photography, he joined the startup Megvii in 2016, where he became chief scientist and managing director of research. At the company, he led the development of the ShuffleNet neural network that runs on mobile devices, as well as Brain++, Megvii’s main working platform. In 2019, he was appointed dean of the College of Artificial Intelligence at Xi’an Jiaotong University, his alma mater. He has received a number of industry and academic awards; in 2010, he was included in the list of “Innovators under 35” by MIT Technology Review. He holds 35 patents in the United States, 13 of which are international.

Feng Yanghe

In July 2023, Feng Yanghe, an AI expert in China’s defense sector, died at the age of 38 while en route to what his obituary described as an “important mission.” Feng’s work focused on military field training, reinforcement learning, and intelligent planning; he was an associate professor at the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, Hunan Province. He led the departments that developed the War Skull I and War Skull II AI systems used by the People’s Liberation Army to simulate military training during joint operations. Before transferring to the National University of Defense Technology as part of a joint study program, he studied statistics at Harvard University and high-performance computing at the University of Iowa from 2011 to 2013.

In 2023, artificial intelligence expert Tang Xiaoou, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the founder of the tech giant SenseTime, passed away at the age of 55. The cause of his death was an illness, the nature of which was not disclosed. In 1990, he received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (Anhui Province) and moved to the United States for graduate school. In 1991, he received a master’s degree from the University of Rochester (New York) and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. His research covered the fields of computer vision, image recognition, and video processing; he contributed to the industrialization of machine vision technology in China. From 2005 to 2008, he was the head of the visual computing group at Microsoft Research Asia; in 2014, he founded SenseTime. SenseTime has developed real-time multi-view facial capture and recognition technology. Some cities use its solutions to monitor crowd density and detect illegally parked vehicles. Ririxin’s large model has helped SenseTime build its generative AI business in areas such as finance, healthcare, and office work.

Tang Xiao

He Zhi, co-founder and chief innovation officer of healthcare AI company Yidu Tech, died early on the morning of April 29, 2024, following “an unsuccessful attempt to save his life” after suffering respiratory and cardiac arrest due to altitude sickness. He was an “outstanding pioneer” who ushered in the digitalization of the healthcare industry, according to his obituary. He entered the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Tsinghua University in 2000 and earned a master’s degree in electronic communications and engineering in 2009. He worked at tech giant Alibaba from 2012 to 2014. In 2015, he co-founded Yidu Tech, where he was responsible for innovation and technology development at the company, which develops healthcare solutions based on big data and AI technologies.

On January 14, 2025, Quan Yuhui, an expert in computer image processing and an associate professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at South China University of Technology (Guangdong Province), passed away at the age of 39 after an illness. Quan received his master’s degree in 2008 and his PhD from the same university in 2013. He continued his education at the National University of Singapore; in 2016, he returned to his home university, where he began his career as a teacher. His research focused on the cutting-edge areas of computational photography, unsupervised learning, and texture analysis. He led numerous research projects at the provincial and national levels, published more than 80 scientific papers, and served as a reviewer for prestigious international scientific journals and conferences. In 2024, he was included in the list of “the top 2% of scientists in the world” according to Stanford University.