Professional Bio

Hello! I am co-founder and chief scientist at Reka. At Reka, we’re working on building amazing state-of-the-art generative models and advancing AI research.

Previously, I was a senior research scientist at Google Brain working on large language models and artificial intelligence. Before joining the Brain team, I was the Tech Lead of a US-based research team at Google Research working on Transformer scaling & architectures. During this time, I also made contributions to about ~20 product launches.

During my tenure at Google, I contributed to many industry defining large language models such as PaLM, UL2, Flan-{PaLM/UL2/T5}, LaMDA/Bard, MUM etc. I also contributed to large multimodal models such as ViT-22B and PaLI-X. Amongst the many things I worked on this space, I was the modeling co-lead on the new PaLM-2 and PaLM API.

Personal

I am happily married to Vanessa Chew who is a music professional. Recently, I became a father to our newborn baby girl Mireille Tay. My family currently lives in Singapore (where we were both from). We lived in Mountain View, California for a short while in 2019/2020.

I’m a fan of classical music. 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.

Fun Fact: I obtained an associate diploma in classical piano performance from Trinity College London in 2012.