Shanghai (ZXZC)- Xu Wei, a prominent scientist of Baidu's Institute of Deep Learning (IDL), announced on July 24 that he has joined Chinese AI startup Horizon Robotics as Chief Scientist of General AI and plans to build the General AI lab in Silicon Valley powered by a skilled AI team.

Xu Wei had worked at Facebook, taking charge of creating and developing Facebook's large-scale recommender platform. In September 2013, he joined Baidu and specialized in the development and algorithm study of the PaddlePaddle. Reportedly, the PaddlePaddle is an all-new scalable deep learning platform developed by Baidu's scientists and engineers, which was open to the public in the second half of 2016. After nearly 3-year R&D, it has been widely used for search ranking, targeted advertising, image identification, machine translation as well as autonomous driving, etc.

Indeed, Xu Wei and Yu Kai, the founder of Horizon Robotics, were colleagues at Baidu. Yu had also worked at the Internet giant as vice president in Baidu Research. Besides, he is also one of the founders of Baidu's IDL and autonomous driving arm. In May, 2015, he resigned from Baidu and set up his own AI startup, Horizon Robotics.

Xu's participation is expected to speed up the R&D of AI technology for Horizon Robotics. After two years’ R&D, Horizon Robotics unveiled Chinese first world-leading, Brain Processing Unit (BPU) based, proprietary Gauss-architecture embedded AI computer vision processors dubbed Journey and Sunrise, powering smart cars and smart cameras, to provide industrial customers with a complete solution including algorithm, chip and cloud. 

In last October, the startup announced that it had raised over $100 million in its Series A plus financing round from Intel, Harvest Investments, Hillhouse Capital Group and other investors.