China’s post 1990s generation of AI talent is something to behold. One thing that has caught my attention is the age of the people building China’s frontier AI. Kimi’s founder was born in 1992. Many of the teams behind MiniMax, Seedance, Zhipu, and other leading AI companies are dominated by engineers born in the 1990s and early 2000s. This isn’t limited to AI. This year’s Fields Medals also went to two Chinese mathematicians from the same generation. I don’t think these are isolated events. They may be early signals of a much deeper trend: what we’re witnessing is not just an AI boom, but the emergence of a new generation of scientific and engineering talent in China. One possible explanation is education. After the Cultural Revolution ended, China’s education system was gradually rebuilt. The generation that became today’s parents of many 90s and 00s children benefited from that recovery, and many placed an extraordinary emphasis on education. The result may be the first generation of Chinese researchers and entrepreneurs raised in families where higher education had become both accessible and deeply valued. If this hypothesis is right, AI is only the beginning. We may see the same generation produce breakthroughs not only in frontier models, but also in quantum computing, biology, mathematics, computer science, and many other fields over the coming decades.