On March 21, Jia Yangqing, vice president of technology at Alibaba, said goodbye to Alibaba in a message in the circle of friends, saying that he will move towards the next challenge of his career. It is reported that Jia Yangqing will start a business, the company is positioned to provide large-model infrastructure, and has locked in the first round of financing. This news has aroused the attention and discussion of the industry and netizens.
Who is Jia Yangqing? What did he do at Alibaba? Why did he leave to start a business? What is his entrepreneurial direction?
Jia Yangqing is an AI scientist with an international reputation. He studied automation at Tsinghua University as an undergraduate and graduate student, and later pursued a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. During his Ph.D., he founded and open-sourced the now well-known deep learning framework Caffe4, which has been adopted by Microsoft, Yahoo, NVIDIA, Adobe and others. He has served as a senior researcher and engineer in the field of artificial intelligence in well-known Internet companies such as Yahoo and Facebook.
Jia Yangqing is one of the core members of Alibaba's technology team. On March 18, 2019, Alibaba DAMO Academy announced through its Zhihu account that former Facebook AI scientist Jia Yangqing has officially joined Alibaba as vice president of technology to lead the research and development of the big data computing platform. During his time at Alibaba, Jia Yangqing led the Computing Platform Division to build a big data and AI platform and create value for customers on the cloud. He has also been involved in the development and promotion of several important projects and products, such as ONNX, PyTorch, Caffe2, etc.
In terms of leaving and starting a business, Jia Yangqing said that he is fortunate to lead the computing platform business unit to achieve an industry-leading position in the big data and AI business, but also plans to move on to the next challenge of his career. It is reported that Jia Yang's entrepreneurial direction is AI architecture, specifically, a company that provides large model infrastructure, with the goal of improving the efficiency of artificial intelligence productization, including developer efficiency and system efficiency. End-to-end solutions to help enterprises and developers deploy AI efficiently. It is said that Jia Yangqing started the business together with his comrades who have worked side by side for many years, and have worked together on ONNX, PyTorch and Caffe2 projects.
Alibaba has undergone major changes, and Jia Yangqing, vice president of technology, has left. This is an event to watch and think about. It reflects not only the changes and adjustments within Alibaba's technical team, but also the internal and external changes and challenges in the AI field. We look forward to Jia Yangqing's success in his new entrepreneurial path, and Alibaba to continue to play a leadership and influence in the field of AI."