PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Yue Cao

Yue Cao is a computer-vision researcher whose work spans Swin Transformer and video-generation models. He earned bachelor's and doctoral degrees at Tsinghua and completed his PhD in 2019. He worked as a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and coauthored Swin Transformer, which won ICCV's 2021 Marr Prize for Best Paper. He joined BAAI and co-founded Lightyears Away before he founded Sand.ai in 2024; in 2025, he coauthored the MAGI-1 world model. As of October 2026, he is CEO of Sand.ai.

Now at
Sand.ai
Works
46
Citations
48,032
h-index
28
Rankings
#97 by citations since 2021
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2014–2019

    A PhD at Tsinghua

    He earns bachelor's and doctoral degrees at Tsinghua and completes his PhD in 2019 under Jianmin Wang's co-supervision.

  2. 2019–2022

    Research at Microsoft Asia

    He works as a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia from 2019 to 2022.

  3. 2021

    The Marr Prize

    He coauthors Swin Transformer, a hierarchical vision Transformer with shifted windows. The paper receives ICCV's 2021 Marr Prize for Best Paper.

  4. 2022–2023

    At BAAI and Lightyears Away

    He joins BAAI in 2022 and becomes a co-founder of Lightyears Away in 2023.

  5. January 2024

    Founding Sand.ai

    He founds Sand.ai in January 2024 to develop video-generation models.

  6. 2025

    The MAGI-1 model

    In 2025, he coauthors MAGI-1, a world model that generates videos by predicting fixed-length chunks autoregressively.

  7. April 2025

    Releasing MAGI-1 weights

    Sand.ai releases the MAGI-1 model weights and inference code in April 2025.

  8. As of October 2026

    CEO of Sand.ai

    As of October 2026, he is CEO of Sand.ai.

A language model matched the links in this timeline to people, organizations and papers (provisional, model-judged).

Career

  1. Since 2024Sand.aiFounder, CEO
  2. From 2023Lightyears AwayCo-founder
  3. From 2022Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence
  4. 2021–2023University of British Columbia
  5. 2021–2023University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus
  6. 2020–2022Microsoft
  7. 2019–2022Microsoft ResearchSenior Researcher

Education

  1. 2019Tsinghua UniversityBachelor's degree

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

Most-cited works

  1. Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows2021 · IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) · 35,113 citationsWith Han Hu, Stephen Lin and Yixuan Wei
  2. Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution2022 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2,647 citationsWith Furu Wei, Han Hu, Yixuan Wei and Zhenda Xie
  3. GCNet: Non-Local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond2019 · 2,298 citationsWith Han Hu and Stephen Lin
  4. Video Swin Transformer2022 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2,274 citationsWith Han Hu, Stephen Lin and Yixuan Wei
  5. SimMIM: a Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling2022 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 1,319 citationsWith Han Hu and Zhenda Xie

From OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 2% to 33%Includes Microsoft. We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 2% in 1975–1979 to 33% in 2020–2024.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Microsoft. Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.
  3. Google alumni founded or led 77 other organizations, the most among the labs we compareIncludes Microsoft. We trace 177 organizations founded or led by AI lab alumni, and 186 career moves between the labs.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Microsoft. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1962 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Yue Cao yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Mingsheng Long - Tsinghua University ise.thss.tsinghua.edu.cn. Checked 18 October 2026.
  2. ICPR22-SSL icpr2022ssl.github.io. Checked 18 October 2026.
  3. ICCV 2021 PAPER AWARDS | ICCV 2021 iccv2021.thecvf.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  4. Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer Using Shifted Windows openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  5. MaHui Entrepreneur | Sand.ai's Yue Cao: A Decade from Researcher to Entrepreneur Traces the Evolution of Large Models elsewhere.news. Checked 18 October 2026.
  6. Exclusive: Sand.ai's Cao Yue Secures Over USD 100M in Financing - Why Video Is the Most Critical Path to the World Model eu.36kr.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  7. MAGI-1: Autoregressive Video Generation at Scale arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  8. sand-ai/MAGI-1 · Hugging Face huggingface.co. Checked 18 October 2026.
  9. Magi: AI Video Generator & AI Video Extender By Sand.ai sand.ai. Checked 18 October 2026.