Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

If Qi Lu was a prime example of the cosmopolitan nature of the AI community, his background made him one of the community’s most unlikely participants. Brought up by his grandfather in a poverty-stricken countryside at the height of Mao Zedong’s5 Cultural Revolution, he ate meat just once a year, when his family celebrated the spring festival, and attended a school where a single teacher taught four hundred students. Yet he overcame all the natural disadvantages he faced to take a degree in computing science at Shanghai’s Fudan University and to attract the attention, in the late ’80s, of the American computer scientist Edmund Clarke, who happened to be in China looking for talent he could bring back to his own university, Carnegie Mellon. Clarke gave a speech at Fudan on a Sunday, when Lu typically rode his bike across the city to visit his parents, but when a heavy rain came down, he stayed home. That afternoon, someone knocked on his door, urging him to fill a seat at Clarke’s lecture. Too many seats were empty because of the rain. So Lu saw the lecture, and after impressing Clarke with his questions from across the auditorium, he was invited to apply for a spot at Carnegie Mellon. “It was luck,” he remembers. “If it hadn’t rained, I would have gone to see my parents.”