Be like Dr. Kai-Fu Lee.
> 1988, CMU, nobody believed in neural networks yet.
> Built the world's first large-vocabulary speaker-independent ASR system anyway.
> Called it Sphinx.
> Apple called.
> Led speech recognition for six years. Demo-ed speech recognition live on national television with the CEO of Apple.
> In 1992. Microsoft called.
> Built a research lab in Beijing from scratch. That lab trained the AI leaders who went on to run Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba.
> Google called. Built Google China from zero.
> Microsoft tried to block it in court. Lost.
> Wrote the book that explained the US-China AI race to the rest of the world.
> Got cancer.
> Wrote another book. Came back.
> Built a frontier LLM company at 63.
> Shipped Yi-34B and went toe to toe with the best in the world.
The man didn't follow the AI wave. He made several of them.