Jie Tang

Jie Tang is a computer science professor at Tsinghua University and co-founder of Zhipu AI, one of the earliest Chinese foundation-model startups . In the "academic faction" of China's large-language-model entrepreneurs, he and Zhipu CEO Zhang Peng are tagged as having an "academy style" and "grand will," with the company founded in 2019 initially working on natural language processing and knowledge-graph mapping before pivoting to LLMs . Tang also served as doctoral advisor to Zhang Yutao, a co-founder of Recurrent AI (later Moonshot AI), and his knowledge-engineering research group at Tsinghua, alongside Li Juanzi's team, has been described as a main lineage feeding the university's NLP startup ecosystem . Alibaba's investment approach to large-model startups has at times favored more seasoned figures like Tang alongside peers such as Kai-Fu Lee and Wang Xiaochuan .