One of the world’s top coders, known as Godfather, is backing a Chinese self-driving car start-up
When two legendary programmers left Baidu to form their own venture, they became talent magnets in a crucial battle for the best and brightest in AI.
In the geek world there is no shortage of legendary stories about James Peng and Lou Tiancheng – even before they co-founded China’s answer to Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet.
Ten years ago Lou, now 32 and nicknamed Godfather of hackers, was the best Chinese contestant at Topcoder Open – the equivalent of the Olympics for hackers – and his record from a decade ago still ranks him among the top eight globally today.
Ex-Google Brain head and artificial intelligence guru Andrew Ng once called Lou “one of the world’s best hackers”. Not to be outdone, Peng, about 10 years Lou’s senior, was Baidu’s first employee in the US, serving as its chief architect for autonomous driving with a technical ranking only one notch below chief executive Robin Li.
So when the programming rock stars left Baidu a little over a year ago to form their own venture Pony.ai, they became talent magnets to the extent that whenever they showed up at a Silicon Valley cafe, there would be a resignation letter filed in the afternoon, according to Hu Wen, chief operating officer of Pony.ai.
“Graduates would ask for their autographs at campus recruitment events,” said Hu, who worked for Chinese bank ICBC International before joining Pony.ai in September.
