Professional Bio

Hello! I am currently a senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind working on LLM and AI research.

Previously, I was the chief scientist and co-founder of Reka AI. Before being a startup co-founder, I was a senior research scientist at Google Brain.

I work on large language models and AI research. My notable works in the past include PaLM-2, UL2 and Flan-2. I enjoy working on architecture and pretraining research and have worked extensively on Transformer scaling & architectures.

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.