Jie Tang: Tsinghua AI Pioneer | Generated by AI
Comprehensive Introduction to Jie Tang: Tsinghua’s AI Trailblazer
Jie Tang, born in 1977, is a pioneering figure in artificial intelligence, data mining, and knowledge engineering. As a full-time professor in the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University—one of China’s premier institutions—he has shaped the global AI landscape through groundbreaking research, prolific publications, and entrepreneurial ventures. Often hailed as a “leading scientist” in AI, Tang’s work bridges academia and industry, focusing on making machines “think like humans” via artificial general intelligence (AGI). His influence extends far beyond the classroom: with over 60,000 citations on Google Scholar, he’s not just an academic heavyweight but a founder driving China’s AI surge.
Early Life and Education
Tang’s academic journey is deeply rooted in Tsinghua. He earned his PhD in computer science from the university in 2006, following a bachelor’s and master’s there as well. This homegrown expertise laid the foundation for his lifelong commitment to AI and networks. Early on, he tackled real-world problems like social influence analysis and academic collaboration mining, which foreshadowed his later innovations.
Professional Career
Tang joined Tsinghua’s faculty shortly after his PhD and quickly rose to prominence. Today, he serves as a WeBank Chair Professor and leads the Knowledge Engineering Group (KEG) at the Department of Computer Science. His roles extend to high-impact editorial positions, including Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Big Data and AI Open Journal. He’s also a frequent organizer in the field, having chaired the WWW 2023 conference and served on program committees for events like WWW 2022.
Beyond academia, Tang is a serial innovator. In 2019, he co-founded Zhipu AI (智谱AI), a Tsinghua spinoff that’s become one of China’s “AI Tigers”—a elite group of generative AI startups alongside Moonshot AI and Baichuan. As Zhipu’s chief scientist and co-CEO, he oversees AI development, steering the company toward AGI ambitions. Zhipu has raised over $2.7 billion in funding by mid-2025, including a $140 million round from Shanghai state funds in July, and filed for an IPO in April 2025, positioning it as the first major Chinese AI firm to go public on the A-share market. Despite some executive turnover this year, Tang remains a steady force, holding a direct 7.4% stake.
Research Interests and Key Contributions
Tang’s research spans AGI, machine learning, data mining, social networks, and knowledge graphs. He’s passionate about graph neural networks and representation learning, using them to model complex relationships—like academic collaborations or social dynamics.
His crown jewel is the ArnetMiner system (2008), an academic search engine that mines over 136 million researchers and 200 million papers. It earned the SIGKDD Test-of-Time Award in 2018 for its decade-long impact and powers AMiner.org, which draws 30 million users from 220 countries.
In the LLM era, Tang’s GLM (General Language Model) series has redefined open-source AI in China. Launched in 2022, ChatGLM—built on GLM-130B (a 130-billion-parameter bilingual model)—has been downloaded nearly 10 million times worldwide. It’s excelled in multilingual tasks, powering chatbots and beyond. Recent 2025 releases include GLM-4.1V-Thinking (a visual-language model open-sourced in July) and GLM-4.5, which boosts reasoning, coding, and agentic capabilities, rivaling global leaders like GPT-4. Other hits: CogView (text-to-image), CogVideo (text-to-video), and CodeGeex (code generation), all from his THUDM lab.
Tang’s work emphasizes open innovation: GLM models have been adopted by over 1,000 organizations across 70+ countries, fueling everything from education to enterprise AI.
Awards and Recognition
Tang’s accolades reflect his stature:
- Fellow of ACM, AAAI, and IEEE (rare triple crown in AI).
- NSFC Distinguished Young Scholar.
- SIGKDD Test-of-Time Award (2018) and Service Award.
- UK’s Royal Society-Newton Advanced Fellowship.
- 2nd National Award for Science & Technology (China).
- Earlier nods like IBM Faculty Award (2010) and Tsinghua’s Academic New Star (2010).
He’s delivered keynotes at ICLR 2024 (“The ChatGLM’s Road to AGI”) and CKDD 2024 (“GLM: From Large Models to AGI Development”), underscoring his forward-thinking vision.
Personal Impact and Legacy
At 48, Tang embodies China’s “reverse brain drain” trend, mentoring a new generation amid US-China tech tensions. Tsinghua’s AI push—poaching talents like Alex Lamb—owes much to his blueprint. Zhipu’s rise, from academic roots to IPO frontrunner, highlights his founder acumen: blending rigorous research with scalable products.
Looking ahead, Tang is hiring for AGI-focused postdocs and students, signaling more breakthroughs. In a field racing toward superintelligence, he’s not just participating—he’s accelerating.
Jie Tang’s Homepage
Jie Tang Wikipedia
Tang Jie Google Scholar
The Rise of Zhipu AI
Zhipu AI Funding and IPO
GLM-4.5 Developments
Tsinghua AI Leadership