(Yicai Global) Aug 4 -- The director of ByteDance’s Artificial Intelligence Lab has left the TikTok operator to join the University of California Santa Barbara as an associate professor. He is the latest in a string of Chinese scientists to leave the corporate world for academia where there is less pressure to make money and more opportunity to do proper research.

Li Lei, whose profile is already displayed on the UCSB website, is following his predecessor, Ma Weiying, ex- vice president of Beijing-based ByteDance and former head of the AI Lab, into the world of academia. Ma left last year to join the Institute for AI Industry Research at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

AI Labs in China are under increasing pressure to achieve business goals in order to deliver a return on the long-term capital investment from companies, The Paper reported today, citing industry insiders. E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding’s Damo Academy, for instance, has been told to be responsible for its own profits and losses.

Returning to academia gives researchers a higher degree of freedom. US software behemoth Microsoft’s Executive VP Harry Shum and Chinese search engine giant Baidu’s VP Zhang Yaqin also recently jumped ship to join Tsinghua University.

Editor: Kim Taylor