The official rollout of Tesla’s Robotaxi is undoubtedly yesterday’s biggest news in the automotive world. Elon Musk marked the occasion by reposting and liking numerous tweets from team members on social media platform X, as a form of recognition.
In the group photo of the AI team that has gone viral online, the man holding the camera at the center of the image naturally drew the attention of Chinese media. For those who have been following Tesla for a while, he is no stranger — it’s Phil Duan, the man who once said, “I’d rather be exhausted than idle.”
Phil Duan (Chinese name: Duan Pengfei) earned his undergraduate degree from Wuhan University of Technology and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Ohio University. He first joined Tesla in 2017 and is currently the lead software engineer on the Tesla Autopilot team.
At Tesla AI Day 2022, Duan served as the presenter introducing Tesla’s neural network model — the Occupancy Network.
As seen in the group photo, there is a notable number of Chinese faces on the team. In his celebratory tweet, Duan also mentioned a fellow Chinese engineer, Patrick Cho, describing him as “the mastermind behind a lot of our breakthroughs.”
According to information from LinkedIn, Patrick Cho holds a master’s degree from Stanford University and joined Tesla in 2019. After several internal transitions, he now serves as a project manager on the vision team.
In Duan’s tweet, we can also spot a few other Chinese engineers who were not explicitly mentioned.
Charles Qi earned his undergraduate degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University and completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University. His primary research areas include 3D deep learning and computer vision, particularly deep learning models on point clouds and their applications in object recognition and scene perception.
During his doctoral studies, he published extensively at top-tier academic conferences including CVPR, ICCV, NIPS, ICML, and SIGGRAPH Asia, accumulating over 5,000 citations in academia. Between 2018 and 2019, he was a visiting scholar and postdoctoral researcher at Facebook AI Research. He previously worked at Waymo LLC, Google’s autonomous driving subsidiary, focusing on cutting-edge algorithm research and development. Currently, he contributes to FSD development on Tesla’s Autopilot team.
Xiuming Zhang is currently a senior machine learning scientist on Tesla’s autonomous driving team, focusing on 3D object and scene understanding for self-driving vehicles and robotics. Before joining Tesla, he worked on computational photography technologies at Adobe’s Emerging Products Group.
In August 2016, Zhang earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, under the supervision of Professor William T. Freeman. During his time at MIT, he also interned at Google Research, where he was mentored by Dr. Jonathan T. Barron.
His doctoral thesis, Shape, Reflectance, and Illumination From Appearance, explored inverse rendering and its applications, including 3D shape reconstruction and free-viewpoint relighting. His research earned him the Snap Research Fellowship in 2019, was exhibited at the MIT Museum, and was featured by major media outlets such as BBC, Forbes, Yahoo, and Popular Mechanics. He joined Tesla’s intelligent driving team in 2022, working on real-world perception functionalities.
Their names may not be widely known, but their work is shaping the future of autonomous driving.
Tesla’s journey toward Robotaxi has only just begun, but one thing is clear: Chinese engineers are no longer just participants in this technological revolution — they are key drivers.
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