From High‑School Code to DeepMind: Yu Lijun’s AI Video Journey

Yu Lijun’s journey from a high‑school programmer to a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind is a striking example of how curiosity can shape a career. In 2026 he was named to MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Asia Pacific list for his AI video work. His story is especially relevant for anyone who wants to work in AI‑generated video.

While still in high school, Yu wrote a program that rang a bell at scheduled times when the school’s regular system was turned off for exams. He later enrolled at Peking University and, in 2019, earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science and economics.

A professor’s encouragement led Yu to change his focus to artificial intelligence. In 2018 he joined a summer research program at Carnegie Mellon University, and after a research internship at Google he became a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind in May 2024.

At DeepMind, Yu’s work produced the MAGVIT and MAGVIT‑v2 systems, and the VideoPoet model that creates videos from text instructions. He also contributed to the Gemini family of models, Veo 3.1 and the Nano Banana tool, and VideoPoet won a Best Paper Award at the 2024 International Conference on Machine Learning.

Yu advises students to follow AI research only if they are truly interested, asking, “When the AI buzz eventually fizzles out, would you still want to research it?” His career shows genuine curiosity can lead to breakthrough achievements.

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