Iโve been asked several times whether Zhilin Yang, the founder of @Kimi_Moonshot was my PhD student. The answer is yes and he is absolutely brilliant.
But Iโve been incredibly fortunate to work with so many outstanding PhD students over the years. So I thought Iโd brag a little about them and their career paths (of course there are also many MSc and undergraduate students, sorry if I missed anyone):
Founders / Founding Team Members
Devendra Chaplot @dchaplot PhD, Founding Member Thinking Machines / Mistral
Zhilin Yang PhD, Founder & CEO, Moonshot AI
Jimmy Ba @jimmybajimmyba MSc/PhD, Co-founder xAI
Hubert Tsai PhD, Co-founder Spuree, Apple
Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines; Co-founder Vayu Robotics
Charlie Tang PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines, DE Shaw.
Professors
Paul Liang @pliang279 PhD, MIT
Ben Eysenbach @ben_eysenbach PhD, Princeton University
Ruosong Wang @RuosongW PhD, Peking University
Bhuwan Dhingra @bhuwandhingra PhD, Duke University
Roger Grosse @RogerGrosse Postdoc, University of Toronto
Alexander Schwing Postdoc, UIUC
Research Scientists
Shuyan Zhou @shuyanzh36, Postdoc, Meta Superintelligence Lab
Tiffany Min @SoYeonTiffMin PhD, Microsoft AI
Murtaza Dalal @mihdalal PhD, Tesla AI
Minji Yoon @MinjiYoon90 , PhD, Microsoft AI
Shrimai Prabhumoye PhD, NVIDIA AI, Mistral
Haitian Sun @sun_haitian PhD, Google DeepMind
Emilio Parisotto PhD, Google DeepMind
Lisa Lee PhD @rl_agent, Google DeepMind
Manzil Zaheer @ManzilZaheer PhD, Google DeepMind
Jamie Kiros PhD, Google Brain, OpenAI
Yuri Burda PhD, OpenAI, Anthropic
Cody Severinski PhD, Amazon
ATTENTION EVERYONE IN MEMPHIS TENNESSEE
Tamboli's Pasta & Pizza REFUSED to serve four members of the Tennessee National Guard.
This is the owner, Miles Tamboli.
Would be a shame if everyone in the area knew they kicked out US servicemembers!
In 1995 Nvidia failed to deliver the chip Sega paid for.
Jensen Huang flew to Tokyo, admitted he picked the wrong architecture, and asked Sega to convert the $5M owed into equity.
He told them the money would probably be lost. Sega said yes anyway.
That $5M funded the RIVA 128. Yesterday Huang went back to the same Akihabara arcade to thank Irimajiri in person, 30 years later.
Nvidia survives, goes public. Sega sells early.
Held to today, that stake would be worth about $1 trillion.