AI is now destined to be in the news and in our lives, whether it is for the wrong or the right reasons. Any field taking massive strides takes its toll on the people who drive it, people who make it happen. China very recently celebrated a major AI milestone with DeepSeek, its latest global offering that drew global attention for its low cost model. It was low on compute as well. It overtook ChatGPT as the top ranked free app on Apple’s app store. China has a number of success stories in AI and is seriously building on it to be a major challenger to the US.
As the AI talent pool grows and so do the success stories, one disturbing trend is coming to the fore. Now we find a growing concern over pressures of competition. As per a top media report on Tuesday five top Chinese scientists have died prematurely in recent years succumbing to heavy work pressure. We are all aware of the fact that China is locked in a tech war with the US in the AI field. All have been early deaths of experts due to accidents or illness drives the story home that all is not well.
Quite logically concerns are being raised about the personal safety of those in the industry and the stressful research environment they face. Many of the ones so lost studied in the US and returned to work in China. There is no denying the fact that AI researchers draw huge salaries, but what about their quality of life, working under intense pressure.The industry is growing at an exponential pace and additionally the competition as we all know is a bit too fierce. It is a battle for the AI crown in the world and be the ultimate changemaker in the world, way beyond anyone has made so far.
See the irony, paradox or fate of AI researchers; by the time one researcher came up with an idea and made it halfway through an experiment, it might just happen that someone else might have already published on the same topic. They are faced with ethical pressures too, one is not even sure what to create / develop today may take what trajectory. This prospect is killing. The recent report in question has compiled a list of top AI scientists who died between 2022 and 2025 – at a relatively young age. The notables are; Sun Jian, in June 2022, famous for image recognition and computer vision with 35 US patents, Feng Yanghe, 38, focussed on war games, reinforcement learning and intelligent planning, Tang Xiaoou with expertise in computer vision, pattern recognition and video processing, and Quan Yuhui, a computer image processing expert.
THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH IN THE AI WORLD TOO, EVEN LIFE CAN BE AT STAKE!
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.