Wu Yuhuai （second from the right）
By Jin Yingying
At the highly anticipated unveiling of the Grok3 reasoning model on Feb 18, Elon Musk referred to it as “the smartest AI on Earth”. During the event, Musk and his engineering team sat on either side, but the spotlight was on two Chinese scientists, with a young man in a light-colored shirt (second from the right in the image) capturing significant attention.
He is Wu Yuhuai, a brilliant post-1995er from Hangzhou who has quickly made a name for himself in the AI world.
Wu’s remarkable academic achievements were highlighted by his role in developing the Grok3 model. This event also highlighted the high concentration of Chinese talent in the core team. Alongside Wu, other notable Chinese team members include Zhang Guodong, a graduate of Zhejiang University, reinforcing the team’s “Chinese connection”.
Born in 1995 in Jiande, Wu Yuhuai began his academic journey in Hangzhou, where he attended Xin’anjiang Primary School and later Ziyang Primary School. He then moved on to Jianlan Middle School in Hangzhou before relocating to Canada for high school.
In 2015, Wu graduated with a perfect GPA from the University of New Brunswick in Canada. He earned his Ph.D. in Machine Learning from the University of Toronto in 2021, where he studied under Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “father of deep learning.” During his Ph.D., Wu also interned at Google DeepMind and OpenAI before working at Google and conducting postdoctoral research at Stanford University.
In July 2023, Wu Yuhuai joined Elon Musk’s newly formed xAI as a co-founder, with the goal of advancing artificial intelligence to better understand the nature of the universe and introducing Grok3, a powerful new reasoning model.
AI expert Andrej Karpathy, who tested Grok3 for two hours, shared his thoughts in a detailed post, praising the model for its depth of thought and reasoning ability, which he rated on par with OpenAI’s top model, o1-pro, and slightly better than Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking model.
The increasing presence of Chinese talent in the AI field is making waves. Of xAI’s founding team of 12, five members are Chinese, including both Wu and Jimmy Ba.