Jia Haonan is from the Passenger Temple.

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Is the No.1 AI chipmaker of domestic independent cars – founder of Horizon Yu Kai no longer the CEO?

Just saw this picture, I thought the Electric Vehicle One Hundred Person Forum was in chaos …

I never thought that Yu Kai’s external title has really changed.

What signal is this?

Yu Kai’s New Title

CEO changes in commercial companies have always been a big deal.

Either it is voluntary, like Bill Gates, who voluntarily became the “chief architect,” or the Google founders who didn’t want to be burdened by company operations.

More often it is passive and can’t help it, like Steve Jobs, who was kicked out.

Which category does Horizon Technologies belong to?

We don’t know specifically, but it’s certainly not the passive kind.

Moreover, from the internal wind of Horizon, “not hanging CEO hanging chief scientist” is still Yu Kai’s initiative.

Why?

There is a saying that due to the smooth progress of business, the phased tasks of commercializing chips have achieved remarkable results, and the strategic leading position is also very clear. The priority of the founder’s “chief executive” is not so high.

It is said that at the Horizon Annual Meeting in 2022, Yu Kai emphasized “high-quality development” the most, and repeatedly reminded everyone to focus on technology, and the barrier of a technology company must be technology.

This … is somewhat Versailles.

After all, whether it’s AI chip making or autonomous driving chip companies, the challenge is first to make the chip and then sell it. This is a survival issue.

But according to the focus revealed by Yu Kai, Horizon is already thinking about development issues.

In any case, although it is just a title change, it is still not simple behind it.

But the problem is – can Yu Kai do this “chief scientist” job well?

In 2016, this was not a problem.

But in the past six years of the Horizon entrepreneurial process, CEO Yu Kai appeared too much in the industry and talked about it again and again in various activities. The technical side has been almost forgotten.

Yu Kai, the Chief Scientist of Horizon Robotics

Yu Kai is the Chief Scientist of Horizon Robotics. It’s no problem to say that he has returned to his original position because Horizon Robotics is a company founded by scientists, isn’t it?

Yu Kai graduated from Nanjing University with a bachelor’s degree and got a PhD in computer science from Technical University of Munich.

Before founding Horizon Robotics, Yu Kai had always been recognized as a world-class AI leader.

Firstly, let’s talk about some hard indicators.

Yu Kai has made significant contributions in areas such as deep learning, feature learning, Bayesian learning, Gaussian processes, recommendation systems, image recognition, and image retrieval. He has published dozens of high-quality papers in famous academic conferences and journals and has been cited more than 20,000 times.

In addition, he is a member of the program committee of many top-level computer science conferences (such as NIPS, ICML, SIGIR, KDD, IJCAI, etc.) and an expert judge for multiple international top-level journals (such as JMLR, TPAMI, MLJ, TNN, TKDE) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF).

Moreover, his experience in academia is characterized by words like “first” and “innovative”.

During his time at NEC Research Institute in the United States, the team led by Yu Kai was one of the world’s five earliest labs pioneering in the study of deep networks. The other four team leaders are all famous AI leaders, such as Bengio, LeCun, Hinton, and Andrew Ng.

Bengio, a Turing Award winner and one of the three giants of AI, also listed Yu Kai as an important figure of deep learning on his personal website. It’s also said that Andrew Ng’s joining Baidu was due to Yu Kai’s introduction.

In the industry, Yu Kai has worked for companies such as Microsoft Asia Research Institute and Siemens. His main responsibilities are in the research and development of product technologies in fields such as deep learning, image recognition, text mining, multimedia retrieval, video surveillance, and human-computer interaction.

In 2012, Yu Kai joined Baidu and was responsible for the technology research and development in fields such as speech, image, and audio for the Internet and mobile applications. Many of Baidu’s AI applications, such as face recognition, OCR, and voice search, were initially proposed and researched under Yu Kai’s leadership.

His most important achievement at Baidu was to lead the establishment of the Baidu Institute of Deep Learning (IDL), from scratch to maturity as its Executive Vice Dean (with Li Yanhong serving as the Dean).

IDL is not only Baidu, but also the first AI research institute in China based on deep learning, which has a milestone significance in the history of China’s artificial intelligence development. Nowadays, many renowned entrepreneurs and leaders in the fields of AI, intelligent automobiles, and autonomous driving have emerged from IDL.

Yu Kai’s career has always been closely associated with technology research, and he is also a world-leading figure in AI.

As chief scientist, Yu Kai is perfectly suited for his role at Horizon.

What About the Daily Business of Horizon?

Yu Kai emphasizes his identity as a scientist and how to promote the business of Horizon.

For now, this does not seem to be a problem.

In the early stages, there were many questions from external parties about Horizon’s chip-making capabilities.

However, now Horizon’s J3 autonomous driving chip has shipped over 1 million units, and has been installed on more than 40 car models.

When the latest J5 chip was released, it attracted cooperation from several major domestic car manufacturers.

In addition, six months ago, Dr. Chen Liming, the former president of Bosch’s chassis control system in China, joined Horizon and became its president.

Dr. Chen has worked for Bosch for 26 years, serving as senior vice president of Bosch Group and president of Bosch Chassis Systems Control Division in China, responsible for promoting all the affairs of the Chassis Systems Control Division in China. His experience and abilities are both highly regarded.

Yu Kai’s “backstep” also shows a broad-minded attitude of valuing talents, as the highest honor a company or organization can give to its employees is to not have a “glass ceiling” restriction.

Of course, before Horizon, there were such cases.

However, for many more companies, the arrangement was only made before or after IPO listing.

On the one hand, it is because of stable business growth, and on the other hand, it is for a better anticipation of the company’s opportunities and future.

This move by Horizon is quite interesting~

This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.