Academia is for Ambition — Alex Zhang, MIT
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

Academia is for Ambition — Alex Zhang, MIT

B2Upper-intermediateOctober 2, 20261 hr 41 min
  • Interview
  • Technology

Last call for regular tickets for AI Engineer NYC! As an exclusive for Latent Space subscribers, the first 30 of you can take a 30% off code if it helps - for new tickets only, no refunds! See you in 2 weeks! While we tend to cover industry on the pod, every so often we celebrate a clearly emerging superstar PhD. In 2024 we featured Shunyu Yao, who went on to build Operator at OpenAI and is now Chief AI Scientist of Tencent. In 2025 we featured Jack Morris, who went on to cofound Engram at $600m and is now a leading...

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I guess most famously of RLMs, but you have a few other affiliations.

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0:00

All right, we're here in the studio with Alex Zhang. I guess most famously of RLMs, but you have a few other affiliations. Welcome to the show. Yeah, thank you for having me.

0:13

Yeah, I guess GPU mode as well. Yes, GPU mode as well. You were shepherded in by Mark Sarafin, not everyone gets that kind of welcome. Yeah, I'm very, very close to all the people in GPU mode.

0:23

So yeah, we often end up working together in various capacities, like even beyond just GPU mode itself. Yeah, can we explain that so people who are not that close don't know about this it's a discord it used to be Focused on I guess CUDA mode and then then generalize a little bit. It was started by mark

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