According to Tech星球, Yan Zhijie, the head of Alibaba's Tongyi Lab's speech team, officially left the company on February 15th. His position was P10, a senior level within Alibaba's P-series system.
Yan Zhijie is an expert in intelligent speech. He entered the USTC (University of Science and Technology of China) speech lab in 2003 to pursue his doctorate under Professor Wang Renhua, the founder of iFlytek. After receiving his PhD in 2008, he worked as a principal researcher in the speech group at Microsoft Research Asia until 2015, focusing on speech recognition and speech synthesis. Academically, he has published numerous top-tier papers and holds multiple patents.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, licensed through Midjourney.
After joining Alibaba in 2015, Yan Zhijie served as the director of the IDST intelligent speech interaction team. In 2017, he became the head of the DAMO Academy's machine intelligence speech lab, one of the original thirteen core members of DAMO Academy. With the arrival of the large model era in 2023, Yan Zhijie led the development of "Tongyi Tingwu," Alibaba's first publicly tested large model application, an AI assistant focusing on audio and video content. In 2024, he appeared at public events as the head of Tongyi Lab's speech team.
Currently, Yan Zhijie's future plans are unclear, but industry insiders predict that this speech technology expert may join the wave of AI startups.
