Maybe worth asking why so many highly qualified people with Chinese last names decide to work for US-based companies when Chinese AI companies have been hiring like crazy for the last six years?

"China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot." - Lee Kuan Yew

I believe that's super easy to answer: VC money.

Salaries in the US are a multiple of what they are inside China. And for the top 0.1% on the skill scale, the factor is probably 10x to 100x. Now not everyone reaches that level and many fail and burn (or suffer through un-payable student loans for many years), but still the few people that make it into OpenAI are probably paid 100x of what they could earn in their hometown in Asia.

Citation: The OG gpt-3 paper has ~23 authors and two with Chinese last names (and both are Asian Americans) :)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

Jokes aside - you can replace Chinese with Indian too and still the same answer holds. There is something magical about Silicon Valley and it is definitely not about the salaries. Fwiw, bytedance pays in the 7 figures usd in Beijing!

Do you get paid in USD in Beijing? And if not how do you get the money out?

Wow 7 Indians.

While I don't know any Chinese who worked in that particular field, those who work in tech seem to share the sentiment the article is describing. Plus I don't think those resources would have mattered to much; you're still giving up the bragging rights of having been there first. So I guess most of those Chinese names are people who just want to work on this stuff and ended up where that is possible.

There is a massive number of Chinese people in the San Francisco Bay Area, often multi-generational. I’m not sure if use Chinese names as an indicator.