He Quit Baidu. But First He Had to Build an AI Version of Himself.

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NEWSHe Quit Baidu. But First He Had to Build an AI Version of Himself.<br>As Chinese firms expand internal AI systems, some employees are being asked to build digital versions of themselves before leaving their jobs.

By He Qitong<br>May 28, 2026#technology

Before resigning from Chinese tech giant Baidu this spring, algorithm engineer Wei Ying spent a week on a new kind of handover: building an AI version of himself.<br>Coworkers fed his code, documents, research, and chat histories into an internal AI system trained to mimic how he solved problems and responded to colleagues. Within a week, it could replace “90% of his work,” Wei said, using a pseudonym for privacy reasons.<br>After he left, coworkers could still message “Wei” with technical questions, assign tasks, send voice notes, or upload pictures. Named after his core skill, the bot had its own avatar and could manage the work and replicate parts of his coding and collaboration style.<br>“The only thing you can’t do is video call it,” said Wei.<br>As more Chinese companies adopt AI tools internally, workers are increasingly being asked to turn their knowledge and workflows into reusable systems designed to outlast them inside the workplace.<br>Chinese social media users have started calling the phenomenon zhengliu, or “distillation” — repurposing a technical AI term for compressing the knowledge of a large AI model into a smaller, more efficient one.<br>Under a month after gaming giant Tencent announced that its open AI platform SkillHub surpassed 13,000 official and user-created skills, Shanghai AI Laboratory engineer Zhou Tianyi built a parody project called “colleague.skill.”

The project proposed turning former coworkers into AI agents trained on their files, chat histories, and work habits, and its slogan — “Turning cold farewells into warm skills. Welcome to Digital Life 1.0.” — captured the possibility of their digital selves living on forever.<br>Within 10 days, the project gathered more than 10,000 stars on developer platform GitHub. Spin-offs soon followed: AI “skills” for ex-partners, investors, and even celebrities, designed to distill everyone into reusable AI personas.<br>On Chinese social media, many compared the phenomenon to “soul refining,” a xianxia fantasy trope in which spirits are extracted, transformed, and absorbed after death. “Honestly, I just wanted to do something fun and didn’t expect it to go viral,” Zhou told Sixth Tone.<br>Young tech sector employees, however, are less amused. Worried that they might be helping train their own replacements, some began withholding parts of their workflow, while others experimented with “anti-distillation” tools designed to conceal how they worked from AI systems.<br>Glorious evolution<br>Wei summed up the process in a final message to a colleague: “Thanks for refining me into a skill. Even though I won’t be here anymore, I can still do my part for the team,” he wrote.<br>“Thank you for contributing to our glorious evolution,” the colleague replied.

Wei said the process moved quickly because years of his work had already been carefully documented across reviews, research notes, code, and internal records.<br>“You realize something a person used to excel at can later be replaced by a skill,” he said. But without it, he added, his unfinished work would have fallen to his colleagues. “They would have been exhausted.”<br>Because leaving was his own decision, Wei said he accepted the process calmly. “It’s like leaving a tombstone,” he said. “You want it to look good when future colleagues see it.”<br>Inside Baidu, AI use was visible down to the token, with internal dashboards ranking employees by activity. “There’s no explicit KPI, but your manager knows, and your manager’s manager knows,” Wei said. “If you use too few tokens, bosses will ask questions.”<br>After skill development expanded, Wei’s department encouraged employees to present AI-related results each week. “It isn’t mandatory,” Wei said, “but whether you do it affects promotion prospects.”<br>The pressure has spread beyond China’s tech sector. Xue, 33, who works at a finance company in southwestern China’s Sichuan province, said his employer issued an internal notice in late March encouraging staff to create AI skills and build a company skill base.

Soon, Xue said, one colleague uploaded more than 10 skills at once. Others felt they had to keep up. “Everyone feels anxious,” Xue told Sixth Tone, using only his surname for privacy reasons. “If I don’t work harder, I’ll be abandoned by the times.”<br>Some skills, he said, were rarely used. Others created more work as employees tried to convert messy daily tasks into reusable AI workflows. Sharing them across departments created another discomfort: work that once belonged to one person or team could now be absorbed into a common...