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Kai-Fu Lee

CEO of Sinovation Ventures, Sinovation Ventures

Search every verified Kai-Fu Lee interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Kai-fu Lee, founder and CEO of 01.AI and chairman of Sinovation Ventures, has been active in public discussions on AI deployment, competition, and workforce impact. At the 2026 Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi, he participated in a panel on moving enterprise AI from pilot to scale, describing his company's approach of deploying models on-premise to address CEO data concerns and offering AI products tailored for executives such as chief business officers and chief investment officers. He also discussed using AI agents to form an investment committee for Sinovation Ventures, noting it produces reports for consultation rather than direct investment decisions. In interviews and podcasts, Lee has commented on the global AI race, stating that US export controls have not worked as intended and that Chinese engineers have produced nearly comparable results with a fraction of the GPU power. He has said American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are likely to make more money, comparing them to the iPhone, while Chinese companies resemble Android with larger market share at lower cost. Lee has also argued that AI transformation must be led by CEOs rather than delegated to CIOs, and has warned that job displacement from AI will begin with cognitive work, urging society to rethink its dependence on jobs. He has promoted his book "AI Native," released in September 2026, and discussed AI teaching assistant products that he said could improve PISA scores within a year while keeping teachers in place.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“Most of our products start at the top so a CEO can hardly spend $500 a month. So that compared to the CEO salary is not the problem. So we always recommend to use the best models. Now the best models being closed and far away does present the problem, as you mentioned, because CEOs don't want their data to go anywhere, right? And so what we generally do is on premise deployment, which means unless the CEO wants to us”

“It's 99% surface level. Not going deep. And the reason for that is when you just ask the departments what they do you want to build, well, you can build lots of agents that can save a little bit of money or make a demo. But if you think about how powerful these AI models are, right from OpenAI and other companies, these are so smart. You can say they're like IQ 300 models. If you hire IQ 300 employee, would you let h”

“The invasion of the AI workers will begin with cognitive work, as we've already seen. If it can do software engineers' high-paying work, it can surely do call centers, BPO, accounting, legal, so on and so forth. So for people holding cognitive work, the writing is on the wall, and they need to fly to safety. And then after that, I think, basically, the blue-collar workers will have a similar problem. The gap between ”

“The Chinese models are cheaper because the Chinese entrepreneurs and large companies are poor. They couldn't raise the kind of money that OpenAI and Anthropic did, so they were forced to make do with however much money they raised, which is less than 10% of the American giants. So they tried to train with less than 10% of the compute power. They have to squeeze everything, otherwise they couldn't even do experiments.”

“It's becoming clearer that the export controls do not work. And it's interesting to see people acknowledge it hasn't worked. Therefore, we need more of it. I think at the time when the export control came out, it appeared like it might work. I thought it might work because training the model requires a lot of chips. But, I think what's underestimated is that the Chinese engineers' cleverness to make a good enough sol”

“I think most CEOs feel, especially traditional company CEOs, that they're not an AI expert just like they were not an internet and database expert. So, they delegate and defer to the CIO who is an important asset to the company, but whose job is to install software. It's not to drive AI transformation. So, an AI transformation can only be done from the top for a couple of reasons. One, the transformation is about cha”

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