Beijing: Five top Chinese AI scientists have died prematurely in recent years succumbing to heavy work pressure as China is locked in a tech war with the US in the Artificial Intelligence field, a media report said on Tuesday.
China was abuzz this year with DeepSeek, the latest AI offering that drew global attention for its low-cost model. Further, DeepSeek’s R1 used a fraction of compute power as compared to established AI models like ChatGPT.
Also, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT as the top-ranked free app on Apple’s Appstore, as the US tech industry - that has long justified injecting billions of dollars into AI investments — watched in sheer disbelief.
But while China has a growing AI talent pool and home-grown success stories, the country has also lost some of its leading figures in the crucial sector, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.
The early deaths of these experts – due to accidents or illness – have raised concerns about the personal safety of those in the industry and the stressful research environment they face, the report said.
Significantly, many of them studied in the US and returned to work in China.
Chinese computer scientist Liu Shaoshan said that while AI researchers might earn huge salaries, they were also under intense pressure.
“The industry is developing too fast and the competition is very fierce,” Liu told the Post, adding that by the time one researcher came up with an idea and made it halfway through an experiment, someone else might have already published on the same topic.
Liu added that practitioners also faced ethical pressures. “AI can also have a big impact on society as its use spreads, and this unknown potential for a huge change in society can also put them under very high moral pressure,” the Post quoted Liu as saying.
The report also compiled a list of top AI scientists who died – between 2022 and 2025 – at a relatively young age.
Most of them were in their scientific prime and had made discoveries in key areas such as computer vision, military artificial intelligence and medical AI, it said.
In June 2022, Sun Jian, chief scientist at Beijing-based AI company Megvii Technology, died of sudden illness at the age of 45. Megvii is involved in developing image recognition and deep learning software.
Sun was a renowned figure in the field of AI and computer vision. A former Microsoft researcher with years of expertise in computer vision and computational photography, Sun returned to China from the US and joined start-up Megvii in 2016 as chief scientist and managing director of
research.