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 in the GenAI unit. 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 (and for a very short while).

Before my brief 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 (where I was 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 or Differentiable Search Index). 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. While I am physically in Singapore largely because of family and convenience, I consider myself a global citizen and do not identify with the local AI scene :).

I’m a big 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.