How Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao went from constructing on-line gaming empire to betting fortune on neuroscience, AI

Chen, 53, and his agency, Shanda Group, stated earlier this 12 months that they’re dedicated to investing billions of {dollars} in expertise, together with brain-computer interface and synthetic intelligence.

But lengthy earlier than Shanda turned a multinational funding agency with a give attention to expertise, it was China’s largest web firm and a pioneer of the nation’s on-line gaming business.

It was initially established as Shanda Interactive Entertainment in 1999 by then 26-year-old Chen, his spouse Chriss Luo and his youthful brother with roughly $60,000 in financial savings.

Before that, Chen had graduated from Fudan University a 12 months early with a level in economics, met Chrissy whereas they had been each working at a securities agency and married her inside six months. They left their jobs to begin the enterprise.

At the time, many Chinese entrepreneurs had been racing to construct web portals and internet directories modeled on early platforms like Yahoo!. Such internet corporations largely used pageviews to show their reputation to advertisers and buyers.

“We had an interest in games but didn’t want to do something that another company had already done because it wasn’t interesting or exciting enough for us,” Chen recounted in a 2007 interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Shanda’s sport consumer, nevertheless, was a software program that didn’t depend on loading internet pages, making it tough to draw buyers within the early levels.

“That’s why we decided on games plus instant messenger. But because it was hard to find investors, we had a lot of pressure.”

Despite the challenges, Chen and his group pushed forward. Their breakthrough got here after they purchased the distribution rights to a South Korean sport named Legend of Mir II, which shortly generated a surge in income and gave Shanda the capital to start creating its personal titles.

Shanda went public within the U.S. in 2004, elevating $151.8 million in its preliminary public providing. They went on to grow to be the biggest web firm in China shortly after that.

Chen was ranked the third richest man in China by Forbes that very same 12 months. His present web price is estimated at $1.4 billion as of June 2.

But as Shanda hit its peak within the mid-2000s and Chen’s affect at occasions rivaled that of Alibaba’s Jack Ma, he started experiencing extreme panic assaults.

“I remember some nights, I wake up, and my heart is going boom, boom, boom,” Chen later stated in a 2018 interview for a Medium publish. “I realized something terrible was happening to me.”

The panic assaults led Chen and his spouse to relocate to Singapore in 2010, the place they step by step stepped again from day-to-day involvement within the enterprise. They then took Shanda non-public and shifted its headquarters to the city-state in 2012.

They later bought their stakes within the video games unit, Shanda Games, which that they had earlier spun off, and Chen additionally stepped down from its board.

While taking his break in Singapore, Chen noticed as rivals corresponding to Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu stuffed the area Shanda had as soon as occupied and at one level thought of a return to the business. However, his spouse inspired him to as a substitute discover new alternatives past gaming.

Chen Tianqiao (R) and his spouse Chrissy Luo. Photo from Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute’s web site

In a 2017 interview with Bloomberg at his Singapore workplace, Chen mirrored on that interval as a crucial pause, saying he was prepared to maneuver on from his thirtysomething self to what he described as a brand new chapter.

“I look at him and think he was a bright young man,” Chen stated within the interview. “But I need to let that Tianqiao stay there and move forward.”

After a interval in Singapore, the couple moved to the U.S. and turned Shanda right into a technology-focused funding platform deploying capital by means of public markets, enterprise capital and personal fairness, although the shift was not with out its strain.

“When I was at Shanda, I did not watch how the stocks were doing. As long as I kept working hard, the price would go up gradually each quarter,” he informed Chinese media in an interview posted on Shanda’s web site.

“But now I don’t have a company or that feeling of control. I invest in others and wonder if they will work hard. This sense of uncertainty is always with me, even now.”

Since shifting to the U.S., Chen has additionally turned his consideration to mind analysis, pledging round $1 billion to the sphere and collaborating with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

His curiosity, in line with the Chinese media interview, was sparked after studying about Caltech neuroscientist Richard A. Andersen’s work that enabled a paralyzed affected person to regulate a robotic arm together with his thoughts.

That second prompted him to discover neuroscience extra deeply. He started finding out undergraduate-level textbooks supplied by the president of Stanford University, utilizing them as a approach to construct each language expertise and scientific understanding concurrently.

Over time, he additionally engaged straight with neuroscientists, holding discussions, listening intently, taking detailed notes, and cross-referencing concepts as he discovered.

Shanda is now a serious investor in brain-computer interface applied sciences, which translate neural indicators into digital instructions that can be utilized to assist therapies for neurological situations corresponding to epilepsy and Parkinson’s illness.

As curiosity in AI accelerated lately, Chen’s curiosity has expanded additional into frontier AI improvement.

He is betting his private fortune on what he describes as “discoverative AI,” a system designed to transcend present giant language fashions, which primarily replicate human patterns in generated content material. Often known as synthetic basic intelligence, such expertise may also help in catastrophe planning and even drug discovery.

“I want to create an AI that is not just intended to replace humans, but to do things that humans cannot do, so that humans can go further,” Chen informed Bloomberg earlier this 12 months.