But in August 2020, after 28 years in the US, Zhu astonished his colleagues and friends by suddenly moving back to China, where he took up professorships at two top Beijing universities and a directorship in a state-sponsored AI institute. The Chinese media feted him as a patriot assisting “the motherland” in its race toward artificial intelligence. US lawmakers would later demand to know how funders such as UCLA and the Pentagon had ignored “concerning signs” of Zhu’s ties to a geopolitical rival. In 2023, Zhu became a member of China’s top political advisory body, where he proposed that China should treat AI with the same strategic urgency as a nuclear weapons programme.
Zhu insists that these ideas are built on sand. A sign of true intelligence, he argues, is the ability to reason towards a goal with minimal inputs – what he calls a “small data, big task” approach, compared with the “big data, small task” approach employed by large language models like ChatGPT. AGI, Zhu’s team has recently said, is characterised by qualities such as resourcefulness in novel situations, social and physical intuition, and an understanding of cause and effect. Large language models, Zhu believes, will never achieve this. Some AI experts in the US have similarly questioned the prevailing orthodoxy in Silicon Valley, and their views have grown louder this year as AI progress has slowed and new releases, like GPT-5, have disappointed. A different path is needed, and that is what Zhu is working on in Beijing.
I only watched a few of his (Strozek, Rescue Dawn & The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser). I'm aching to watch Aguirre next.
The original title of Kaspar Hauser is "Every man for himself and god against them all" which fits my pereception of his movies perfectly.