About Me

I am the founder and CEO of a company called K-Scale Labs. We are building general-purpose robots to bring embodied intelligence into the real world. We are making this technology open-source and free for anyone to audit, build on, and optimize for their own use cases, because we believe this is both the best way to increase adoption of embodied intelligence and to ensure that it is maximally beneficial to humanity.

Previously, I have worked as an AI researcher and engineer at Tesla, Meta, Google and Amazon. At Tesla, I trained and deployed the first autoregressive transformer for outputting car waypoints, which required rewriting the neural network compiler for Tesla's HW3 ASIC. I also wrote the CUDA kernels to generate the ground truth data for training our voxel occupancy network, which was later adapted to be used by the Optimus robot. At Meta, I trained and deployed the first transformer model for content moderation, before transitioning into AI research. I co-developed one of the first large-scale speech foundation models (a billion parameters was large by 2021 standards), which has since been adopted by the open-source community for applications like offline voice cloning and speech generation. I also worked briefly on semantic mapping for robotics.

I obtained my degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Emory University, where I also did extensive research in computational neuroscience as part of an NIH-funded training grant, the highlight of which was meeting the woman who is now my wife. Most of this grant was spent working in the Hasler lab at Georgia Tech on neuromorphic computing with analog circuits, which is where I first developed an interest in deep learning. After graduating, I took a three-month break to attend a language school in rural China, which I consider to be the best career decision I've ever made.