Nvidia scientist praises intern who quit chipmaker to join DeepSeek: ‘Much impressed by his decision’
Zhiding Yu, principal research scientist at Nvidia, has praised a former intern who quit the chipmaker to join DeepSeek.
Zhiding Yu, principal research scientist at Nvidia, has praised a former intern who quit the chipmaker to join DeepSeek. Yu shared an X post for Zizheng Pan, currently a researcher at DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley by releasing a ChatGPT-like AI model. At a supposed training cost of just $6 million, DeepSeek R1 has achieved performance comparable to OpenAI’s o1 model, which involved billions of dollars in investment from OpenAI and Microsoft.
In his X post, Zhiding Yu expressed happiness for Pan’s success. He revealed that Pan worked as a research intern for Nvidia in the summer of 2023 and the company was close to offering him a full-time position when he decided to join DeepSeek.
At that time, DeepSeek had just three team members. Pan’s gamble on joining a startup clearly paid off.
“I am still very much impressed”
“Zizheng was one of our interns at NVIDIA back in summer 2023. Later, when we were considering to make him a FT offer, he chose to join DeepSeek without much hesitance. Back then, the DeepSeek multimodal team only had 3 people,” Zhiding Yu, principal research scientist at Nvidia, revealed in his X post.
He added that he was very impressed by Zizheng Pan’s decision to join DeepSeek.
“I am still very much impressed by Zizheng’s decision at that time. He has been an important contributor of several important works at DeepSeek, including DeepSeek-VL2, DeepSeek-V3, and DeepSeek-R1. I am personally very happy for his decision and the great achievements,” wrote Yu.
“Best talent from China”
Yu also cautioned against the China vs US narrative, saying it could hurt USA’s long term interests. He said that some of the best talent in the US comes from China, and this talent does not necessarily need to work in the US to succeed.
“Zizheng’s case is a very typical example of what I have witnessed in recent years. Many of our best talents come from China, and these talents don’t have to succeed only in a US company. Instead, we learn a lot from them. The same Sputnik Moment has already happened in AV back in 2022, and it will continue to happen in Robotics and LLM industry as well,” he wrote on X.
Yu concluded his post by saying that the AI industry needs “more talent density, professionalism, learnings, creativity and stronger execution.”
“I love NVIDIA and want to see her as a continued major contributor to the path of AGI and general autonomy. But if we keep cooking up geo-political agendas and creating hostile opinions to Chinese researchers, we will shoot ourselves in the foot and lose even more competitiveness,” he said.
