Oxford AI star Song Yuhang returns to China, but why did he leave chip start-up?

A young scientist who was a leader in Britain’s AI chip field has returned to China, joining Nanjing University earlier this year as an associate professor at its School of Artificial Intelligence.Song Yuhang, whose published papers on artificial intelligence (AI) have been widely cited and reported, obtained his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2022, and is also a recipient of the coveted JP Morgan AI Research Award.According to Song, he and his fellow Oxford PhD candidate Walter Goodwin co-founded Fractile as an entrepreneurial project in 2021. It became one of Britain’s few technology start-ups, aiming to capitalise on the growing demand for computing power by manufacturing AI chips that are faster than Nvidia’s.