I made the difficult decision to leave Persona. Honestly, it looks a bit dumb on the surface. We raised a huge round, we hired a great team, and we’re hitting some really exciting milestones internally, so why?
I want to make great contributions to embodied AI. I'm not sure if that will manifest more as an IC or as leadership over my lifetime (You and Your Research), but my north star is aligned to supporting the intelligence portion of robotics.
Persona is doing great work in robot learning w.r.t. humanoids, but I want to focus on different things. Staying at Persona would give me a large magnitude in an orthogonal direction. There are so many exciting directions in robot learning I want to explore, and working purely on humanoids with in-house hardware limits those directions. I believe Persona's focus is in the right direction, but I'm currently more interested in working on problems that are only enabled by low-cost hardware coupled with real-world deployment.
In general, I'm okay with injecting some noise into my life. I'm very excited about the possibilities this opens up :^) I feel like my growth is bottlenecked by feedback and proximity to the broader robot learning community, so I'm excited to be back in the Bay!
I’m moving into a robotics house in Menlo Park with some really talented people while I figure out my next steps. Thank you to JingXiang Mo and the team for generously giving me a free place to stay, food, robots, and compute. I’ll be working with a pair of Galaxea arms and helping JX’s company as they ideate.
I’m broadly interested in embodied AI and robot foundation models. Especially how we can push robustness, continual learning, and adaptation through real-world deployment. These are the kinds of problems I want to spend the next few years obsessing over. I currently believe the best way to do this is to build robust models for simpler tasks and cheap hardware to enable immediate deployment, and then gradually scale up to more complex tasks and diverse environments. You should deploy in a vertical with ample opportunity for growth.
I’m looking for new opportunities. If any of this resonates with you, please reach out. Would be happy to hear about new companies to join, potential co-founders, and potential research collaborations. I'm biased towards either starting my own company or joining an early stage startup focused on foundation models. Would also love to hear any advice you might have to offer.
Some of my (somewhat exaggerated) hot takes:
There are a lot of great opportunities right now, and I don’t want to get FOMO before jumping into something new. For now, I’ll keep talking to people, catching up on papers, and working on some fun experiments at JX’s house 🫡
I also want to thank the team at Persona, especially the founders Nic, Jide, and Jerry, for taking a huge bet on me. I had minimal experience before joining. No graduate degree, no papers, and really no paper trail in robot learning besides a year of undergrad research. Joining Persona changed my life and exposed me to so many new people, experiences, and ideas that I wouldn’t have otherwise encountered. It’s been amazing building 0→1 with the team, and I couldn’t have asked for a better start to my career :^)
Some fun facts