Li Kaifu (born December 3, 1961) is a Taiwanese computer scientist, investor, and author. He is the founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm, and 01.AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence company. He previously served as the founding director of Microsoft Research China and as president of Google China, playing a pivotal role in the development of the technology industry in China.
Li is widely recognized for his contributions to artificial intelligence, including pioneering work in speech recognition and his influential writings on the global AI landscape. He is the author of the best-selling books AI Superpowers (2018) and AI 2041 (with Chen Qiufan, 2021), and has been named to TIME's 2023 list of the 100 most influential people in AI.
Early Life and Education
Li was born in Taipei, Taiwan, to Li Tianmin, a legislator and historian from Sichuan, China. In 1973, he immigrated to the United States and attended Oak Ridge High School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He received a Bachelor of Science degree, summa cum laude, in computer science from Columbia University in 1983, and earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988.
A Taiwanese national by birth, Li acquired U.S. citizenship through naturalization while young. He voluntarily relinquished his U.S. citizenship in 2011, retaining only his Taiwanese nationality, citing a desire to "get back to [his] roots" as he aged.
Academic Research and Early Career
At Carnegie Mellon, Li worked on topics in machine learning and pattern recognition. In 1986, he and Sanjoy Mahajan developed Bill, a Bayesian learning-based system for playing the board game Othello that won the US national tournament of computer players in 1989. In 1988, he completed his doctoral dissertation on Sphinx, a large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system that drew wide notice in the field.
Li has written two books on speech recognition and more than 60 papers in computer science. His doctoral dissertation was published in 1988 as a Kluwer monograph, Automatic Speech Recognition: The Development of the Sphinx Recognition System. Together with Alex Waibel, he edited Readings in Speech Recognition (1990).
After two years as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon, Li joined Apple Computer in 1990 as a principal research scientist. While at Apple (1990–1996), he headed R&D groups responsible for Apple Bandai Pippin, PlainTalk, Casper (speech interface), and GalaTea (text-to-speech system) for Mac computers. He then moved to Silicon Graphics in 1996, serving as Vice President of its Web Products division and later as president of its multimedia software division, Cosmo Software.
Microsoft and Google China
In 1998, Li moved to Microsoft and went to Beijing, China, where he played a key role in establishing the Microsoft Research (MSR) division there. MSR China later became known as Microsoft Research Asia, regarded as one of the best computer science research labs in the world. Li returned to the United States in 2000 and was promoted to corporate vice president of the interactive services division at Microsoft, a position he held from 2000 to 2005.
In July 2005, Li left Microsoft to take a position at Google. The search company agreed to compensation worth in excess of $10 million, including a $2.5 million cash signing bonus and another $1.5 million cash payment after one year, a package referred to internally at Google as "unprecedented." On July 19, 2005, Microsoft sued Google and Li in a Washington state court, claiming that Li was violating his non-compete agreement. On July 28, 2005, Judge Steven González granted a temporary restraining order, prohibiting Li from working on Google projects that competed with Microsoft pending a trial. On September 13, Judge González issued a ruling permitting Li to work for Google but barring him from starting work on some technical projects until the case went to trial in January 2006. Before the case could go to trial, Google and Microsoft announced a settlement on December 22, 2005, with confidential terms.
At Google China, Li helped establish the company in the market and oversaw its growth. Under his tenure, the Google.cn regional website was launched, and he strengthened the company's teams of engineers and scientists. On September 4, 2009, Li announced his resignation from Google, stating that with a strong leadership team in place, it was a good moment to move to the next chapter in his career. Several months after his departure, Google announced it would stop censorship and move its mainland China servers to Hong Kong.
Sinovation Ventures and 01.AI
In September 2009, Li announced details of a $115 million venture capital fund called Innovation Works (later renamed Sinovation Ventures), a Beijing-based incubator and venture fund focused on early-stage internet and mobile startups. The firm raised successive funds through the 2010s that emphasized AI-related investments.
In March 2023, Li founded 01.AI, an artificial intelligence startup focused on large language models (LLMs) for the Chinese market. In November 2023, the company released its first open-source model, Yi-34B. In January 2024, it introduced a multimodal model, Yi-VL-34B. In February 2025, Li said 01.AI formed a joint lab with Alibaba to advance LLM technologies. In March 2025, the company launched Wanzhi, an enterprise platform for deploying AI applications.
Recognition and Influence
Li has served as co-chair of the World Economic Forum's Global AI Council and has been a prominent voice on the global competition in AI, particularly between the United States and China. His book AI Superpowers has been widely translated and discussed, and he is frequently cited in discussions of AI policy and innovation. He has also authored an autobiography, Making a World of Difference, published in October 2011, detailing his personal life and career history.