Hello! I am currently senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind on the Gemini team.

I currently work on pretraining, post-training and reasoning research. Specifically, I am interested in new paradigms, architectures and RL methods for improving Gemini (and getting humanity to AGI).

I am permanently based in Singapore, reporting to Quoc Le in Mountain View. These days I mostly work very closely with researchers and team members in Mountain View and New York City.

Before returning to Google, I was chief scientist & co-founder of a US-based foundation model AI startup (i.e., Reka AI) where we managed to build a GPT-4 class multimodal model from scratch in a under a year with a tiny team. We raised a cool $120M USD while I was there and managed to be a top-5 org on LMSYS at our peak.

Before my short sabbatical as a startup founder, I was senior research scientist at Google Brain where I worked on AI research. During this time, I worked extensively on Transformer scaling & architectures. My notable contributions at that time include PaLM-2 (serving as one of the modeling/architecture co-leads), UL2, and contributing to other major LLM efforts like Flan-2, PaLM-1, PaLI-X, etc.

As a side project, I also invented generative retrieval (by making one of the pioneering contributions in this field known as DSI). Apparently, this is widely deployed in the industry in a way that far exceeded our initial expectations.

You can find my full list of research & papers here.

Personal

I am happily married to Vanessa Chew who is a music professional. Recently, I became a father to a baby girl.

My family and I currently live in Singapore where we are from. We lived in Mountain View, California for a short while in 2019-2020. My choice and setup of living in Singapore is mostly family driven. However, I also really enjoy the amenities, convenience and food that modern Singapore offers. Apart from that I consider myself mostly a global citizen and mostly do not identify with the local Singapore AI scene at all.

I’m a fan of classical music/piano. I don’t have the time to grind these days anymore but in another life where I did not become a researcher, I would perhaps want to be a professional musician. I obtained an associate diploma in classical piano performance from Trinity College London in 2012.

These days I try to be more physically active, going to the gym more regularly, exploring healthier food choices and trying new sports and activities.

If you’re interested in my personal life, you can find me on instagram here.