PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Steven C. H. Hoi

Also known as Steven Hoi, Steven Chu Hong Hoi, 许主洪

Hoi is a machine-learning researcher who works on multimodal AI at Alibaba. He earned degrees at Tsinghua University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, taught at Nanyang Technological University, and joined Singapore Management University in 2014. In 2019 he became Managing Director of Salesforce Research Asia and was named an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Member. He coauthored CodeT5 in 2021 and the vision-language models BLIP and BLIP-2 in 2022 and 2023, and founded the startup HyperGAI in 2023. He is a vice president at Alibaba Group, which he joined in February 2025, and since September 2025 he works in its Tongyi Lab on multimodal interaction models.

Works
454
Citations
36,213
h-index
89
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2002–2006

    Degrees from Tsinghua and CUHK

    He earns a bachelor's degree in computer science at Tsinghua University in 2002. He completes a master's degree in 2004 and a PhD in 2006 in computer science and engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

  2. 2014

    Joining Singapore Management University

    After serving as a tenured faculty member at Nanyang Technological University, he joins the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University in 2014. At SMU he is also a lead principal investigator at the Living Analytics Research Centre.

  3. 2019

    Leading Salesforce Research Asia

    In 2019, he takes leave from SMU to become Managing Director of Salesforce Research Asia, the company's first AI research hub outside the US, based in Singapore.

  4. 2019

    IEEE Fellow and ACM Distinguished Member

    He is appointed an IEEE Fellow in 2019 for contributions to machine learning for multimedia information retrieval and scalable data analytics. In 2019, the ACM also names him a Distinguished Member.

  5. 2021–2023

    CodeT5, BLIP and BLIP-2

    He coauthors CodeT5, a unified encoder-decoder Transformer for code understanding and generation, in 2021. In 2022 he coauthors BLIP, which bootstraps captions from noisy web data, and in 2023 BLIP-2, which links frozen image encoders to frozen large language models through a lightweight Querying Transformer.

  6. 2023

    Founding HyperGAI

    In 2023, he founds HyperGAI, a startup developing multimodal models for image and video generation, and serves as its founder and CEO.

  7. February 2025

    Vice president at Alibaba

    In February 2025, he joins Alibaba Group as vice president and chief scientist of its Intelligent Information Business Group, with responsibility for multimodal foundation models and agent research for consumer AI.

  8. Since September 2025

    Tongyi Lab at Alibaba

    In September 2025, he moves to Alibaba's Tongyi Lab to focus on multimodal interaction models. He is a vice president of Alibaba Group.

Career

  1. Since 2025AlibabaVice President and Chief Scientist, Vice President
  2. From 2023HyperGAIFounder and CEO
  3. 2019–2025SalesforceManaging Director
  4. 2014–2025Singapore Management UniversityLead Principal Investigator
  5. 2007–2014Nanyang Technological UniversityTenured faculty member

Education

  1. 2006Chinese University of Hong KongPhD
  2. 2004Chinese University of Hong KongMaster's degree
  3. 2002Tsinghua UniversityBachelor's degree

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

  1. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Steven C. H. Hoi. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  2. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Alibaba. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  3. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Alibaba. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.
  4. The top 10 organizations employed 22% of people shaping AI in 2025: 51% of company researchers and 21% of university researchersIncludes Alibaba. We estimate the share of people shaping AI who worked at the top 10 organizations each year from 1955 to 2025, comparing concentration across companies, universities, and institutes and labs.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Steven C. H. Hoi yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Steven Hoi sites.google.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. SMU dons achieve prestigious ACM recognition for outstanding scientific contributions to computing news.smu.edu.sg. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. SMU Artificial Intelligence Expert To Lead Salesforce Research Asia asianscientist.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Salesforce AI research team in Singapore salesforce.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. CodeT5: Identifier-aware Unified Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Models for Code Understanding and Generation arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Steven HOI, Participants of SCAI 2023 scai.gov.sg. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. Alibaba Taps Singaporean AI Scientist Steven Hoi as AI-to-Consumer VP, Report Says yicaiglobal.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. [Exclusive] Qwen AI Head's Departure Is Linked to Intense Internal Race, Insider Says yicaiglobal.com. Checked 20 October 2026.