She is Yan Ning.
She is called the 'Goddess scientist' by Chinese citizens. Chinese people adore her for her work in structural biology, and it was a shock for them when she announced five years ago that she is going to assume the position of professor at Princeton University. Many Chinese were devastated.
In 2022, Yan announced that she is returning to China. She quoted, "I have gained enough experience and confidence now, and I am moving back to my motherland to train scientists at the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation. Shenzhen provided me a good opportunity and compensation, and I am returning back."
All over Chinese social media, people celebrated her with 'welcome back messages' and with the hashtag 'Yening' on Weibo that attracted 440 million views in just 24 hours. Chinese celebrated her, and the Chinese Government cherished her.
And she isn’t the only one. Years before, Qian Xuesen, the scientist who was prominent in the development of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and was one of the founders of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was kicked out of the US after the US government accused him of being a spy (considered by many as the biggest blunder). He was welcomed back like a king by the Chinese government. They provided him with huge compensation and independence to work. He later trained various Chinese students and played a significant role in the development of China's indigenous rocket technology.
Like him, because of the economic development and the huge compensation and career opportunities, thousands of top Chinese scientists in various prominent institutes are returning to China, and that includes Luming Duan. The US government almost pleaded with him to stay in the US, but he returned citing that he is getting good compensation and career opportunities in his motherland.
On Quora, whenever I answer questions about IITs and NITs, I always receive comments claiming that IITians and NITians are not patriotic and always choose to go abroad. People then proceed to curse them left and right.
If you look at China, first they created a better environment and provided due compensation to deserving individuals. Automatically, scientists began to return. However, in India, we fail to create even a minimally conducive environment for people to work. Salaries for scientists, including those at ISRO, are pretty low to the point of being almost degrading for their qualifications. Yet, we criticize them for seeking better opportunities abroad, accusing them of being unpatriotic.
Patriotism works both ways. China said to their scientists: "We’ll pay you almost as much as you were getting there, and we will set up the lab and environment for you to work independently." Chinese scientists replied: "We have learned all that we can from foreign universities, and now I am going back to contribute to my motherland because my motherland is taking care of me."
And what do we have? I'm not even a full-fledged AI researcher. My research area is improving the existing large language models to perform better through various techniques. So, my area is applied analytics rather than core analytics. Even for my research, I have to collaborate with professors/students from foreign universities just to access their tools. Recently, I was developing a large language model with 7 billion parameters, and I used Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU from George Mason University (Luckily I have a contact there and the university was gracious enough to let us use that). In India, you can count the number of colleges that have a supercomputer. Hell, even at NIT Trichy, where I studied, the so-called 8th highest ranked in India and an institute of excellence, we didn’t have a supercomputer until 2019.
Without a supercomputer or funding for AWS (high-power GPU), AI research is almost nil. Mind you I am working only in NLP (Natural Language Processing) so far, a field that deals only with textual data, and even for that I need high-power GPU but all over the world, especially in the CS field people are moving to multimodal analysis (A type of AI technique that combines different types of data and work on it simultaneously) and that will require 10 times higher GPU than what I need.
AI is a future and we already have nationalist Indians screaming India is going to change AI and dominate the field. Oh ya, let me tell you, without high-power GPU, you can only work in a technique that was already 5 years old.
Currently, in India, we are almost in a situation where if you have ambitious ideas in AI, you will have to move to a foreign country just for the resources and independence of working. But guess what, anyone who decides to move away will be called a traitor, unpatriotic, etc by the public.
To make matters worse, the government, which previously provided meager funding to Ph.D. students, has now stopped funding altogether and asked colleges to become self-sufficient. When I was in my Ph.D., all I had to worry about was my research. Now, my juniors are almost working like professors, handling all duties, and then they have to take care of research too. My juniors are telling me that by the end of the day, they barely have any energy to read a research article.
Does any of this bother anyone in India? No. We won’t create a suitable environment for Indian scientists, but we will claim we are the superpower. Funnily, I can see many NRIs claiming that India is a superpower. We practically force talents to go abroad and mock them when they do. We will also complain about IIT/NITs not being in the top institutes in the world.
Yes, this blatant, stupid good for nothing tokenism and nationalism/patriotism is the curse and the new dangerous thing in India. Especially in the last five year, there was such a sudden rise in extreme arrogant nationalism.
Just as we speak tokenism and 10 paise fake, good-for-nothing nationalism all day and night, we label anyone who speaks against it as anti-national. Things have gone to the extent in India that according to that crazy senile old man, 'youngsters should work 70 hours every week out of patriotism for a bare minimum wage.'
One comment for this answer clearly explained this
‘That true, I have been indeed working in the field of core AI research for now around 8 years and work abroad. But i feel the problem is with the attitude itself back home.
Indeed I have even tried to find ways to come back home. Also Got some offers including from IITs. But unfortuneltly there wasnt good work being done in India then that I would feel challenging enough for my growth. Plus their offers were nearly 1/6 of what i was already getting. Indeed the IIT offered me less than their less experienced student.
Unfortuntely the attitude in top places in india is also very bad too. Whilst there is not much of great contribution to the scientific community by any such esteemed institute in india(only a very few exception) profs in such institute often have an atitude that they are already the best in the world. This attitude doens create a conductive environemnt either.’
Note 2: The blind devotees of the crazy old senile man can leave my page. You fellows are the reasons why youngsters are getting taken advantage of and are getting destroyed. I have no respect for him or his devotees. I’ll report and block you if you run off your mouth.
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