Ling Haibin leaves US for Westlake University AI leadership role

Ling’s move from a US public university to a young private Chinese institution is part of a broader talent rebalancing in frontier AI. Westlake is positioning itself as a high‑autonomy research hub with strong industrial links, and recruiting a highly cited computer vision scientist with product impact (LeafSnap) signals that China is not just scaling compute and models, but also deepening its bench of senior academic leadership in core perception and medical‑imaging fields.([scmp.com](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3338607/ai-scientist-ling-haibin-father-worlds-first-plant-id-app-leaves-us-china))

For the race to AGI, this matters less because of one lab’s output and more because of what it says about the conditions top researchers now seek. Ling explicitly cited “freedom” and support for exploration, at a time when many Western academics complain about shrinking grants and heavy compliance overhead. If Chinese institutions can consistently offer competitive funding, compute access, and intellectual latitude, they’ll be able to pull more mid‑career stars back from the US and EU. Over a decade, that can shift where breakthroughs in multimodal perception, AR‑enabled interfaces, and AI‑for‑science actually happen.