grok
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Eric Zelikman
Eric Zelikman is the co-founder and CEO of humans&, a human-centric frontier AI lab in Redwood City building foundation models designed for communication and collaboration rather than automation. A former early researcher at xAI, he helped shape Grok's pretraining data and scaled reinforcement learning for reasoning across Grok 3 and Grok 4. Before that, as a Stanford PhD candidate, he authored STaR and Quiet-STaR, foundational papers that taught language models to reason in natural language using their own rationales. In January 2026, humans& emerged from stealth with a $480M seed round at a roughly $4.48B valuation, backed by Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, GV, SV Angel and Emerson Collective.
Ying Sheng
Ying Sheng is the co-founder and CEO of RadixArk, an AI infrastructure company that spun out of SGLang, the open-source inference engine she helped create in 2023. SGLang now runs across hundreds of thousands of GPUs and serves trillions of tokens a day for Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, xAI and others. A Stanford computer science PhD and former xAI technical staff who co-led the inference team behind Grok, she launched RadixArk in May 2026 with $100 million in seed funding led by Accel at a $400 million valuation, on a mission to make frontier-level AI infrastructure open and accessible to everyone.