Fireside chat with Tim O'Reilly and Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee is the chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and president of the company’s Artificial Intelligence Institute. Sinovation Ventures is a leading venture capital firm, managing US$1.7 billion dual currency investment funds, that is focusing on developing the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies. Kai-Fu has been in artificial intelligence research, development, and investment for more than 30 years. Previously, he was the president of Google China and held executive positions at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. He founded Microsoft Research China, which was named as the hottest research lab by MIT Technology Review. Later renamed Microsoft Research Asia, this institute trained the great majority of AI leaders in China, including CTOs or AI heads at Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Lenovo, Huawei, and Haier. At Apple, he led AI projects in speech and natural language, which were featured on Good Morning America and the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Kai-Fu has authored 10 US patents and more than 100 journal and conference papers. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the author of seven best-selling books in Chinese. His latest, AI Superpowers, launches internationally in the fall of 2018. Kai-Fu has over 50 million followers on social media. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Columbia University and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as honorary doctorate degrees from both Carnegie Mellon and the City University of Hong Kong.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. His original business plan was simply “interesting work for interesting people,” and that’s worked out pretty well. O’Reilly Media delivers online learning, publishes books, runs conferences, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators. Tim has a history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry. In 1998, he organized the meeting where the term “open source software” was agreed on and helped the business world understand its importance. In 2004, with the Web 2.0 Summit, he defined how “Web 2.0” represented not only the resurgence of the web after the dot-com bust but a new model for the computer industry based on big data, collective intelligence, and the internet as a platform. In 2009, with his Gov 2.0 Summit, he framed a conversation about the modernization of government technology that has shaped policy and spawned initiatives at the federal, state, and local level and around the world. He has now turned his attention to implications of AI, the on-demand economy, and other technologies that are transforming the nature of work and the future shape of the business world. This is the subject of his book from Harper Business, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. In addition to his role at O’Reilly Media, Tim is a partner at early-stage venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and serves on the boards of Maker Media (which was spun out from O’Reilly Media in 2012), Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox.

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