Alibaba’s auto driving lab chief Wang Gang leaves to start his own business

Wang Gang, a former vice-president with e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and head of its autonomous driving lab in the DAMO Academy, has quit to start his own business, becoming the latest top scientist to leave a Chinese Big Tech firm.

Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, confirmed Wang’s resignation but declined to comment further. Wang did not reply to a request for comment.

Wang, who focuses on deep learning and its application to computer vision and autonomous driving, intends to start a business that develops cleaning robots and has already raised some funds, according to a report by Chinese media outlet Tech Planet.

Wang joined Hangzhou-based Alibaba in 2017 and played a key role in the development of Tmall Genie, Alibaba’s voice-controlled smart speaker, and autonomous delivery robot Xiaomanlv or “small donkey”. Before joining Alibaba, Wang was an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, leading a research team of around 20 people.

“I hope to build artificial intelligence products that can have practical application and a big social impact, rather than academic impact,” Wang said in an August interview with Alibaba’s corporate news website Alizila. “The objective of Alibaba’s Damo Academy is to develop products that can be used – so this aligns well with my motivation,” he said at the time.

Wang’s departure follows the decision by Alan Qi Yuan, a former vice-president and AI chief scientist at online payments firm Ant Group, an affiliate of Alibaba, to return to academia at the end of 2021.