Microsoft Global Partner Jiang Daxin Starts A Large-scale Modeling Business

Recently, Jiang Daxin, Microsoft’s global partner, vice president, and former chief scientist of Microsoft Asia Research Institute, was reported to have left his previous company and started his own business in the field of large-scale models.

It is said that he has two former colleagues from MSRA supporting him. One is a prominent figure in the field of AI and a flag-bearer for Chinese employees at Microsoft, while the other is a young and promising CEO of a well-known AI unicorn. They will gather in Shanghai.

Jiang Daxin obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2005. He has extensive experience and engineering expertise in fields such as machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, and bioinformatics. To date, he has published over 100 papers with nearly 10,000 citations.

On the current LinkedIn website, Jiang Daxin’s professional updates are still at the beginning of this year. “Starting from March 2023, serving as Vice President at Microsoft.” From joining Microsoft in March 2007 until 2023, Jiang Daxin has spent a total of 16 years with this company.

Jiang Daxin obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees respectively from the University of Science and Technology of China and the Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences. When he went to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science and conducted research on data mining in the field of bioinformatics, deep learning was just emerging.

After obtaining his doctoral degree, he chose to become an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University, where he taught courses on data mining and bioinformatics for graduate and undergraduate students. In December 2006, he resigned from Nanyang Technological University and became an associate researcher at MSRA (Microsoft Research Asia) in March of the following year.

He worked at MSRA for four years, responsible for applied research in fields such as data mining, machine learning, and information retrieval. He was engaged in work related to personalized and context-aware search, progressing from associate researcher to researcher and then chief scientist.

During this period, he published multiple papers at conferences such as SIGKDD, SIGIR, WWW, and WSDM. He received the Best Application Paper Award at SIGKDD 2008 and also served as associate editor and PC member for several journals and conferences.

Starting from 2011, Jiang Daxin transferred to work at STCA. STCA is mainly responsible for the research and development of Microsoft’s global products, including Bing search engine, intelligent voice assistant Cortana, Azure cognitive services, and natural language understanding system for Microsoft 365. After 6 years, Jiang Daxin’s title has been promoted to Microsoft Global Partner, Vice Dean of STCA, and Chief Scientist.

In March 2023, Jiang Daxin was officially promoted to Vice President of Microsoft and also appointed as the General Manager of WebXT S+D (Web Experience, Search, and Distribution) Group at the Asian Software Technology Center. At this time, Jiang Daxin’s main focus is leading a team of over 400 application scientists and engineers in developing algorithms and infrastructure for Microsoft Bing. Additionally, Jiang Daxin’s team provides NLP models and algorithms for various Microsoft products such as Office, Xbox, and Microsoft Cognitive Services.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft Research Asia Refutes Rumors of Relocating from China to Canada

Jiang Daxin is not the first entrepreneur from Microsoft’s big model background. When we count them, many top players have a Microsoft background. For example, Lee Kaifu, former Vice President of Microsoft and one of the founders of MSRA. Zhou Ming, former Executive Deputy Dean of MSRA, has a startup company called Lanzhou Technology established in June 2021. Li Di, former Vice Dean of Microsoft Software Technology Center Asia (STCA) and former Senior Partner at Microsoft Global, is currently the CEO of Xiaoice.

It is not difficult to find that among the alumni of Tsinghua University, their entrepreneurial companies dominate a significant portion of China’s leading industries. The alumni of Microsoft are also a force to be reckoned with.

What specific direction will Jiang Daxin, who has left Microsoft this time and entered the field of large-scale model entrepreneurship, invest in? Besides the two AI experts behind him, which other technological or business talents have chosen to join? With the arrival of a heavyweight player in the battle of large-scale models, what kind of changes will occur?

It will take some time before we can know the answer.