Nvidia taps 2 young Chinese AI experts to strengthen research

Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao, both alumni of China’s Tsinghua University, said on their respective social media accounts that they joined Nvidia, sharing photos of themselves with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of the company.

Zhu, who received his bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Tsinghua in 2018 and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024, joined Nvidia’s Nemotron team as a principal research scientist, according to Zhu’s post on X from over the weekend.

Zhu’s LinkedIn profile showed that he has also been an assistant professor at the University of Washington since September 2024.

“We’ll be joining forces on efforts in [AI] model post-training, evaluation, agents, and building better AI infrastructure – with a strong emphasis on collaboration with developers and academia,” Zhu said, adding that the team was committed to open-sourcing its work and sharing it with the world.

Nemotron is a group at Nvidia dedicated to building enterprise-level AI agents, according to the team’s official website. The team’s Nemotron multimodal models power AI agents for sophisticated text and visual reasoning, coding and tool-use capabilities.

Jiao, who received a PhD in electrical, electronics and communications in engineering from Stanford University in 2018 after graduating from Tsinghua with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, said on LinkedIn over the weekend that he joined Nvidia to “help push the frontier of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI).”