Fintech giant Ant Group has publicly introduced its renowned team of AI researchers for the first time, presenting them as mentors for new talent it plans to recruit for its “exploration journey” towards achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Ant’s “Plan A” talent recruitment programme disclosed the names of world-class mentors who would work with applicants from top universities on AI projects, including AGI, according to a recruitment notice posted by the company on Thursday. Ant is affiliated with Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.
The programme features 12 mentors, including Wu Yi, a former researcher at San Francisco-based OpenAI, who has a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and Le Zhenzhong, formerly a scientist at Google’s artificial intelligence research institute, who holds a degree from Carnegie Mellon University.
Ant’s recruitment of top AI talent comes as other Chinese Big Tech firms have embarked on hiring sprees for AI scientists and researchers, following the success of Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which made its breakthrough in AI model development with a team of more than 100 young scientists.
Ant’s elite AI team also includes He Zhengyu, a PhD graduate from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he built the fastest Max-flow algorithm on a graphics processing unit (GPU) at that time, and Cai Wei, a Stanford University graduate and former senior algorithm engineer at Google, who contributed to products such as Google Image Search and Cloud Vision API, according to their published profiles.
Shen Chunhua was also highlighted on the list. He is a leading AI researcher with 87,000 Google Scholar citations and a H-index score of 137, an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of publications. Shen’s statistical machine-learning research claimed to produce significant advances in areas like target detection and instance segmentation.
Others include Yang Ming, who holds a doctorate in electronic engineering and computer science from Northwestern University, and who was a founding member of Facebook Al Research, and Zheng Da, who has a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in computer science and currently heads the graph computing laboratory of Ant Technology Research Institute.
