Until recently, most leading AI research was produced by experts based in the West. That is changing. In 2025, for the first time, more studies presented at the world’s top AI conference had lead authors based in China than in either America or Europe. To better understand the international ebbs and flows of AI talent, The Economist tracked the education histories of researchers who presented papers at the December 2025 edition of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the world’s largest and most prestigious AI gathering. More than 21,000 papers were submitted to NeurIPS, of which roughly a quarter were accepted. MacroPolo, a now-shuttered think tank, analysed the change in educational background of NeurIPS authors in 2019 and 2022. We applied their method to a random sample of 600 papers (authored by almost 4,000 researchers) from 2025.
Nine of the top ten institutions where authors from the 2025 conference earned their undergraduate degrees were in China. Graduates of Tsinghua University alone accounted for 4% of researchers at NeurIPS. MIT, the leading American institution, produced 1%.
China is increasingly holding on to its AI talent. According to Digital Science, a data firm, China now has more active AI researchers than America, Britain and Europe combined—though it still trails the West per head of population. What’s more, China’s cohort skews younger: 47% are students, compared with about 30% in the West. The country also prioritises education in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM): around two-fifths of Chinese university students study STEM subjects, roughly double America’s share.
