Bio

Short bio of my early life and why I study AI.

I was born in Hefei, China, in 1999, two years after IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov. In some sense, I grew up in the long shadow of AI. I started playing chess at an early age and later won several chess championships in Anhui Province, China, under the guidance of Chess Grandmaster Chongsheng Zeng and Chess Master Yongjin Zhou. When AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol during my high school years, I was deeply shaken: as a chess player, I felt both the beauty of human intelligence and how small we are in front of a new kind of intelligence.

IBM Deep Blue chess computer
Deep Blue A public symbol of machine intelligence entering chess. Source
Go board record from Lee Sedol versus AlphaGo game 4
AlphaGo The moment that made another kind of intelligence feel real to me. Source
Interior of a Steinway grand piano
Piano A long practice in craft, beauty, and the question of creativity. Source

Music gave me a different but related feeling. I have been devoted to the piano for 15 years and once had the privilege of performing alongside the world-renowned pianist Lang Lang. My musical inspirations come from the Romantic era, especially Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, as well as R&B, Jazz, and Neo-Soul. During my undergraduate years, seeing early demos of AI-generated music made me reflect on piano practice as a nearly religious form of self-cultivation: beautiful, demanding, and deeply personal, yet not necessarily a direct path to broader social progress. This reflection, together with my experiences in chess, gradually convinced me that AI was something I needed to work on.

The journey has not always been smooth, but I have continued along this path with the hope that my work can make a small contribution to human knowledge and progress.